Domestic Service

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

It has seemed advisable in sending out a second edition of this work to add a supplementary chapter on the condition of domestic service in Europe. This is based largely on the inquiries made in season and out of season at different times during the past ten years of heads of households and of housekeepers in England, France, Germany, and Italy. It has naturally been impossible to sum up in a single chapter the mass of information thus gleaned, but a few features common to all of these countries have been indicated, as well as some peculiar to each. The literature bearing directly on the subject is very meagre, but a few titles have been indicated.

For information bearing on this part of the work, I am under special obligation to M. Levasseur of Paris, to Miss Collet of the Labor Department of the Board of Trade, London, to Miss E. M. Hall of Rome, to Professor Victor Böhmert, recently of the Royal Statistical Bureau, Dresden, and to Mrs. J. H. W. Stuckenberg of Cambridge, recently of Berlin.

January, 1901.

CONTENTS

DOMESTIC SERVICE — CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Domestic service has been called “the great American question.” If based on the frequency of its discussion in popular literature, foundation for this judgment exists. Few subjects have attracted greater attention, but its consideration has been confined to four general classes of periodicals, each treating it from a different point of view. The popular magazine article is theoretical in character, and often proposes remedies for existing evils without sufficient consideration of the causes of the difficulty. Household journals and the home departments of the secular and the religious press usually treat only of the personal relations existing between mistress and maid. The columns of the daily press given to “occasional correspondents” contain narrations of personal experiences. The humorous columns of the daily and the illustrated weekly papers caricature, on the one side, the ignorance and helplessness of the housekeeper, and, on the other side, the insolence and presumption of the servant. In addition to this, in many localities it has passed into a common proverb that, among housekeepers, with whatever topic conversation begins, it sooner or later gravitates towards the one fixed point of domestic service, while among domestic employees it is none the less certain that other phases of the same general subject are agitated.

This popular discussion, which has assumed so many forms, has been almost exclusively personal in character. A somewhat different aspect of the case is presented when the problem is stated to be “as momentous as that of capital and labor, and as complicated as that of individualism and socialism.” This statement suggests that economic principles are involved, but the question of domestic service has been almost entirely omitted, not without reason, from theoretical, statistical, and historical discussions of economic problems. It has been omitted from theoretical discussions mainly because: (1) the occupation does not involve the investment of a large amount of capital on the part of the individual employer or employee; it therefore seems to be excluded from theoretical discussions of the relations of capital, wages, and labor; (2) no combinations have yet been formed among employers or employees; it is therefore exempt from such speculations as are involved in the consideration of trusts, monopolies, and trade unions; (3) the products of domestic service are more transient than are the results of other forms of labor; this fact must determine somewhat its relative position in economic discussion. Its exclusion, as a rule, from the statistical presentations of the labor question is also not surprising. The various bureaus of labor, both national and state, consider only those subjects for the investigation of which there is a recognized demand. They are the leaders of public opinion in the accumulation of facts, but they are its followers as regards the choice of questions to be studied. Public opinion has not yet demanded a scientific treatise on domestic service, and until it does the bureaus of labor cannot be expected to supply the material for such discussion.[2] Again, it is not surprising that the historical side of the subject has been overlooked, since household employments have been passive recipients, not active participants, in the industrial development of the past century. Yet it must be said that this negative consideration of the subject by theoretical, practical, and historical economists, and the positive treatment accorded it by popular writers, seems an unfair and unscientific disposition to make of an occupation in which by the Census of 1890 one and a half millions of persons are actively engaged,[3] to whom employers pay annually at the lowest rough estimate in cash wages more than $218,000,000,[4] for whose support they pay at the lowest estimate an equal amount,[5] and through whose hands passes so large a part of the finished products of other forms of labor.[6]

It is not difficult, however, to find reasons, in addition to the specific ones suggested, for this somewhat cavalier treatment of domestic service. The nature of the service rendered, as well as the relation between employer and employee, is largely personal; it is believed therefore that all questions involved in the subject can be considered and settled from the personal point of view. It follows from this fact that it is extremely difficult to ascertain the actual condition of the service outside of a single family, or, at best, a locality very narrow in extent, and therefore that it is almost impossible to treat the subject in a comprehensive manner. It follows as a result of the two previous reasons that domestic service has never been considered a part of the great labor question, and that it has not been supposed to be affected by the political, social, and industrial development of the past century as other occupations have been.

These various explanations of the failure to consider domestic service in connection with other forms of labor are in reality but different phases of a fundamental reason—the isolation that has always attended household service and household employments. From the fact that other occupations are largely the result of association and combination they court investigation and the fullest and freest discussion of their underlying principles and their influence on each other. Household service, since it is based on the principle of isolation, is regarded as an affair of the individual with which the public at large has no concern. Other forms of industry are anxious to call to their assistance all the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers of the nation, all the forces that religion, philanthropy, society itself can exert in their behalf. The great majority of housekeepers, if the correspondent of a leading journal is to be trusted, “do not require outside assistance in the management of their affairs, and consequently resent any interference in the administration of their duties.”

The question must arise, however, in view of the interdependence of all other forms of industry, whether it is possible to maintain this perfect separation with regard to any one employment, whether household employments are justified in resenting any intrusion into their domain, whether the individual employer is right in considering household service exclusively a personal affair. An answer to the question may be of help in deciding whether the difficulties that are found in the present system of domestic service arise in every case necessarily from the personal relations which exist between employer and employee, or are largely due to economic conditions over which the individual employer has no control. Still further, the conclusions reached must determine somewhat the nature of the forces to be set in motion to lessen these difficulties.

CHAPTER II HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC EMPLOYMENTS

It is impossible to understand the condition of domestic service as it exists to-day without a cursory glance at the changes in household employments resulting from the inventions of the latter part of the eighteenth century. These changes, unlike many others, came apparently without warning. At the middle of the last century steam was a plaything, electricity a curiosity of the laboratory, and wind and water the only known motive powers. From time immemorial the human hand unaided, except by the simplest machinery, had clothed the world. Iron could be smelted only with wood, and the English parliament had seriously discussed the suppression of the iron trade as the only means of preserving the forests. But during the last third of the century the brilliant inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright had made possible the revolutionizing of all forms of cotton and woollen industries; Watt had given a new motive power to the world; the uses of coal had been multiplied, and soon after its mining rendered safe; while a thousand supplementary inventions had followed quickly in the train of these. A new era of inventive genius had dawned, which was to rival in importance that of the fifteenth century.

The immediate result of these inventions was seen in the rapid transference of all the processes of cotton and woollen manufactures from the home of the individual weaver and spinner to large industrial centres, the centralization of important interests in the hands of a few, and a division of labor that multiplied indefinitely the results previously accomplished.

But the factory system of manufactures that superseded the domestic system of previous generations has not been the product of inventions alone. It has been pointed out by Mr. Carroll D. Wright[7] that while these inventions have been the material forces through which the change was accomplished, other agencies co-operated with them. These co-operating influences have been physical, as illustrated in the discoveries of Watt; philosophical, as seen in the works of Adam Smith; commercial, or the industrial supremacy of England considered as a result of the loss of the American colonies; and philanthropical, or those connected with the work of the Wesleys, John Howard, Hannah More, and Wilberforce. All these acting in conjunction with the material force—invention—have operated on manufacturing industries to produce the factory system of to-day. It is, indeed, because the factory system is the resultant of so many forces working in the past that it touches in the present nearly every great economic, social, political, moral, and philanthropic question.

Although comparatively few of these inventions have been intended primarily to lessen household labor, this era of inventive activity has not been without its effects on household employments. A hundred years ago the household occupations carried on in the average family included, in addition to whatever is now ordinarily done, every form of spinning and weaving cotton, wool and flax, carpet weaving and making, upholstering, knitting, tailoring, the making of boots, shoes, hats, gloves, collars, cuffs, men’s underclothing, quilts, comfortables, mattresses, and pillows; also, the making of soap, starch, candles, yeast, perfumes, medicines, liniments, crackers, cheese, coffee-browning, the drying of fruits and vegetables, and salting and pickling meat. Every article in this list, which might be lengthened, can now be made or prepared for use out of the house of the consumer, not only better but more cheaply by the concentration of capital and labor in large industrial enterprises. Moreover, as a result of other forms of inventive genius, the so-called modern improvements have taken out of the ordinary household many forms of hard and disagreeable labor. The use of kerosene, gas, natural gas, and electricity[8] for all purposes of lighting, and to a certain extent for heating and cooking; the adoption of steam-cleaning for furniture and wearing apparel; the invention of the sewing-machine and other labor-saving contrivances; the improvement of city and village water-works, plumbing, heat-supplying companies, city and village sanitation measures, including the collection of ashes and garbage,—these are all the results of modern business enterprise.

These facts are familiar, but the effects more easily escape notice. The change from individual to collective enterprises, from the domestic to the factory system, has released a vast amount of labor formerly done within the house by women with three results: either this labour has been diverted to other places, or into other channels, or has become idle. The tendency at first was for labor thus released to be diverted to other places. The home spinners and weavers became the spinners and weavers in factories, and later the home workers in other lines became the operatives in other large establishments. As machinery became more simple, women were employed in larger numbers, until now, in several places and in several occupations, their numbers exceed those of men employees.[9] This fact has materially changed the condition of affairs within the household. Under the domestic system of manufactures nearly all women spent part of their time in their own homes in spinning, weaving, and the making of various articles of food and clothing in connection with their more active household duties. When women came to be employed in factories, the division of labor made necessary a readjustment of work so that housekeeping duties were performed by one person giving all her time to them instead of by several persons each giving a part of her time. The tendency of this was at first naturally to decrease the number of women partially employed in household duties, and to increase the demand for women giving all their time to domestic work.

This readjustment of work in the home and in the factory brought also certain other changes that have an important bearing. The first employees were the daughters of farmers, tradesmen, teachers, and professional men of limited means, women of sturdy, energetic New England character. They were women who, in their own homes, had been the spinners and the weavers for the family and who had sometimes eked out a slender income by doing the same work in their homes for others disqualified for it. As machinery was simplified, and new occupations more complex in character were opened to women, their places were taken in factories by Irish immigrants as these in turn have been displaced by the French Canadians. All these changes in the personnel of factory operatives have meant that while much labor has been taken out of the household, that which remained has been performed by fewer hands, and also that women of foreign nationalities have been pressed into household service.

Another and later result of the change from the domestic to the factory system was the diversion of much of the labor at first performed within the household into entirely different channels. The anti-slavery agitation beginning about 1830 enlisted the energies of many women, and the discussions growing out of it were undoubtedly the occasion for the opening of entirely new occupations to them. Oberlin College was founded in 1833 and Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, thus forming the entering wedge for the entrance of women into higher educational work. Medical schools for women were organized and professional life made possible, while business interests began to attract the attention of many.

Another part of the labor released by mechanical inventions and labor-saving contrivances became in time idle labor. By idle labor is meant not only absolute idleness, but labor which is unproductive and adds neither to the comfort nor to the intelligence of society. Work that had previously been performed within the home without money remuneration came to be considered unworthy of the same women when performed for persons outside their own household and for a fixed compensation. The era of so-called fancy-work, which includes all forms of work in hair, wax, leather, beads, rice, feathers, cardboard, and canvas, so offensive to the artistic sense of to-day, was one product of this labor released from necessary productive processes. It was a necessary result because some outlet was needed for the energies of women, society as yet demanded that this outlet should be within the household, and the mechanical instincts were strong while the artistic sense had not been developed. It is an era not to be looked upon with derision, but as an interesting phase in the history of the evolution of woman’s occupation.[10]

Still another channel for this idle labor was found in what has been called “intellectual fancy-work.” Literary clubs and classes sprang up and multiplied, affording occupation to their members, but producing nothing and giving at first only the semblance of education and culture. Many of them became in time a stimulus for more thorough systematic work, but in their origin they were often but a manifestation of aimless activity, of labor released from productive channels.

The era of inventions and resulting business activity has therefore changed materially the condition of affairs within the household. Before this time all women shared in preparing and cooking food; they spun, wove, and made the clothing, and were domestic manufacturers in the sense that they changed the raw material into forms suitable for consumption. But modern inventions and the resulting change in the system of manufactures, as has been seen, necessarily affected household employments. The change has been the same in kind, though not in degree, as has come in the occupations of men. In the last analysis every man is a tiller of the soil, but division of labor has left only a small proportion of men in this employment. So in the last analysis every woman is a housekeeper who “does her own work,” but division of labor has come into the household as well as into the field, though in a more imperfect form. It has left many women in the upper and middle classes unemployed, while many in the lower classes are too heavily burdened; in three of the four great industries which absorb the energies of the majority of women working for remuneration—manufacturing, work in shops, and teaching—the supply of workers is greater than the demand, while in the fourth—domestic service—the reverse is the case. But it cannot be assumed that all of those in the first three classes have necessarily been taken from the fourth class. It has been well said that “through the introduction of machinery, ignorant labor is utilized, not created.” Many who under the old order would have been able to live only under the most primitive conditions, and whose labor can be used under the new order only in the simplest forms of manufacturing, would be entirely unfit to have the care of an ordinary household in its present complex form.

One more effect must be noted of this transference of many forms of household labor to large centres through the operation of inventive genius. It has been seen that many women have thus been left comparatively free from the necessity of labor. The pernicious theory has therefore grown up that women who are rich or well-to-do ought not to work, at least for compensation, since by so doing they crowd out of remunerative employment others who need it. It is a theory that overlooks the historical fact that every person should be in the last analysis a producer, it is based wholly on the assumption that work is a curse and not a blessing, and it does not take into consideration the fact that every woman who works without remuneration, or for less than the market rates, thereby lowers the wages of every person who is a breadwinner. It is a theory which if applied to men engaged in business occupations would check all industrial progress. It is equally a hindrance when applied to women.

This revolutionizing of manufacturing processes through the substitution of the factory for the domestic system has thus rendered necessary a shifting of all forms of household labor. The division of labor here is but partially accomplished, and out of this fact arises a part of the friction that is found in household service.

Household employers and employees may be indifferent to the changes that the industrial revolutions of a century have brought, they may be ignorant of them all, but they have not been unaffected by them, nor can they remain unaffected by changes that may subsequently come in the industrial system. The interdependence of all forms of industry is so complete, that a change cannot revolutionize one without in time revolutionizing all. The old industrial régime cannot be restored, nor can household employments of to-day be put back to their condition of a hundred years ago.

CHAPTER III DOMESTIC SERVICE DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD

It has been seen how great a change the inventions of the past century have made in the character of household employments. A change in the nature of household service no less important has taken place by virtue of the political revolutions of the century, acting in connection with certain economic and social forces. The subject of domestic service looms up so prominently in the foreground to-day that there is danger of forgetting that it has a past as well as a present. Yet it is impossible to understand its present condition without comprehending, in a measure, the manner in which it has been affected by its own history. It is equally impossible to forecast its future without due regard to this history.

Domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The first extends from the early colonization to the time of the Revolution; the second, from the Revolution to about 1850; the third, from 1850 to the present time.

During the colonial period service of every kind was performed by transported convicts, indented white servants or “redemptioners,” “free willers,” negroes, and Indians.[11]

The first three classes—convicts, redemptioners, and free willers—were of European, at first generally of English, birth. The colonization of the new world gave opportunity for the transportation and subsequent employment in the colonies of large numbers of persons who, as a rule, belonged to a low class in the social scale.[12] The mother country looked with satisfaction on this method of disposing of those “such, as had there been no English foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for their Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or dyed untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from want, and vice.”[13] She regarded her “plantations abroad as a good effect proceeding from many evil causes,” and congratulated herself on being freed from “such sort of people, as their crimes and debaucheries would quickly destroy at home, or whom their wants would confine in prisons or force to beg, and so render them useless, and consequently a burthen to the public.”[14]

From the very first the advantage to England of this method of disposing of her undesirable population had been urged. The author of Nova Britannia wrote in 1609: “You see it no new thing, but most profitable for our State, to rid our multitudes of such as lie at home, pestering the land with pestilence and penury, and infecting one another with vice and villanie, worse than the plague it selfe.”[15] So admirable did the plan seem in time that between the years 1661 and 1668 various proposals were made to the King and Council to constitute an office for transporting to the Plantations all vagrants, rogues, and idle persons that could give no account of themselves, felons who had the benefit of clergy, and such as were convicted of petty larceny—such persons to be transported to the nearest seaport and to serve four years if over twenty years of age, and seven years if under twenty.[16] Virginia and Maryland[17] were the colonies to which the majority of these servants were sent, though they were not unknown elsewhere.[18]

Protests were often made against this method of settlement, both by the colonists themselves[19] and by Englishmen,[20] but it was long before the English government abandoned the practice of transporting criminals to the American colonies.[21]

Of the three classes of white, or Christian servants, as they were called to distinguish them from Indians and negroes, the free willers were evidently found only in Maryland. This class was considered even more unfortunate than that of the indented servants or convicts. They were received under the condition that they be allowed a certain number of days in which to dispose of themselves to the greatest advantage. But since servants could be procured for a trifling consideration on absolute terms, there was no disposition to take a class of servants who wished to make their own terms. If they did not succeed in making terms within a certain number of days, they were sold to pay for their passage.[22] The colonists saw very little difference between the transported criminals and political prisoners, the free willers, and the redemptioners who sold themselves into slavery, and as between the two classes—redemptioners and convicted felons—they at first considered the felons the more profitable as their term of service was for seven years, while that of the indented servants was for five years only.[23]

It is impossible to state the proportion of servants belonging to the two classes of transported convicts and redemptioners, but the statement is apparently fair that the redemptioners who sold themselves into service to pay for the cost of their passage constituted by far the larger proportion. These were found in all the colonies, though more numerous in the Southern and Middle colonies than in New England. In Virginia and Maryland they outnumbered negro slaves until the latter part of the seventeenth century.[24] In Massachusetts, apprenticed servants bound for a term of years were sold from ships in Boston as late as 1730,[25] while the general trade in bound white servants lasted until the time of the Revolution,[26] and in Pennsylvania even until this century.[27]

The first redemptioners were naturally of English birth, but after a time they were supplanted by those of other nationalities, particularly by the Germans and Irish. As early as 1718 there was a complaint of the Irish immigrants in Massachusetts.[28] In Connecticut “a parcel of Irish servants, both men and women,” just imported from Dublin, was advertised to be sold cheap in 1764.[29] In 1783 large numbers of Irish and German redemptioners entered Maryland, and a society was formed to assist the Germans who could not speak English.[30]

It has been said that a great majority of the redemptioners belonged at first to a low class in the social scale. A considerable number, however, both men and women, belonged to the respectable, even to the so-called upper classes of society.[31] They were sent over to prevent disadvantageous marriages,[32] to secure inheritances to other members of a family,[33] or to further some criminal scheme.

Many of these bond servants sold themselves into servitude, others were disposed of through emigration brokers,[34] and still others were kidnapped, being enticed on shipboard by persons called “spirits.”[35]

The form of indenture was simple, and varied but little in the different colonies. Stripped of its cumbersome legal phraseology, it included the three main points of time of service, the nature of the service to be performed, although this was usually specified to be “in any such service as his employer shall employ him,” and the compensation to be given.[36]

It sometimes happened that servants came without indenture. In such cases the law expressly and definitely fixed their status, though it was found extremely difficult to decide upon a status that could be permanent. Virginia, in particular, for a long time found it impossible to pass a law free from objections, and its experience will illustrate the difficulties encountered elsewhere. An early law in Virginia provided that if a servant came without indenture, he or she was to serve four years if more than twenty years old, five years if between twelve and twenty years of age, and seven years if under twelve.[37] Subsequently it was provided that all Irish servants without indenture should serve six years if over sixteen and that all under sixteen should serve until the age of twenty-four,[38] and this was again modified into a provision requiring those above sixteen years to serve four years and those under fifteen to serve until twenty-one, the Court to be the judge of their ages.[39] It was soon found, however, that the term of six years “carried with it both rigour and inconvenience” and that thus many were discouraged from coming to the country, and “the peopling of the country retarded.” It was therefore enacted that in the future no servant of any Christian nation coming without indenture should serve longer than those of the same age born in the country.[40] But as the law was also made retroactive, it was soon ordained that all aliens without indenture could serve five years if above sixteen years of age and all under that until they were twenty-four years old, “that being the time lymitted by the laws of England.”[41] This arrangement was equally unsatisfactory, since it was found that under it “a servant if adjudged never soe little under sixteene yeares pays for that small tyme three yeares service, and if he be adjudged more the master looseth the like.” It was then resolved that if the person were adjudged nineteen years or over he or she should serve five years, and if under that age then as many years as he should lack of being twenty-four.[42] This provision was apparently satisfactory, subsequent laws varying only in minor provisions concerning the details of the Act.[43]

The condition of the redemptioners seems to have been, for the most part, an unenviable one. George Alsop, it is true, writes in glowing terms of the advantages enjoyed in Maryland:

Hammond also says of Virginia:

A Glasgow merchant under date of January 19, 1714, also writes: “The servants are all well cloathed and provided with bedding as ye will see,” adding that some servants prefer “Mariland, the reason whereof is that Virginia is a little odious to the people here.”[46]

But these enthusiastic descriptions must be taken cum grano salis. The object of Alsop’s book was to stimulate emigration to Maryland, as is evident from the dedication to Lord Baltimore and to “all the Merchant Adventures for Mary-land.” The object of Leah and Rachel was the same, and others who wrote in a similar strain had evidently little personal knowledge of the condition of the redemptioners. The real life is more truly portrayed in the accounts given by the redemptioners themselves, and many of these are preserved.

The Anglesea Peerage Trial brings out the facts that the redemptioners fared ill, worked hard, lived on a coarse diet, and drank only water sweetened with a little molasses and flavored with ginger.[47] Eddis says the redemptioners were treated worse than the negroes, since the loss of a negro fell on his master; inflexible severity was exercised over the European servants who “groaned beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”[48]

Richard Frethorne, writing from Martin’s Hundred, gives a pitiful tale of the sufferings of the indented servants. “Oh! that you did see my daily and hourly sighs, groans, tears and thumps that I afford my own breast, and rue and curse the time of my birth with holy Job. I thought no head had been able to hold so much water as hath, and doth daily flow from mine eyes.”[49]

The maid who waited on the Sot-Weed Factor says:

Undoubtedly, in time, servants of all kinds received more consideration than had at first been given them;[51] in 1704 Madame Knight even complained of what she considered too great indulgence on the part of the Connecticut farmers towards their slaves.[52] Yet, even at the North, the lot of a servant was not an enviable one, though much was done by the laws of all the colonies to mitigate the condition of the redemptioners, as will be seen later in discussing the legal relations of masters and servants.

The wages paid were, as a rule, small, though some complaints are found, especially in New England, of high wages and poor service.[53] More often the wages were a mere pittance. Elizabeth Evans came from Ireland to serve John Wheelwright for three years. Her wages were to be three pounds a year and passage paid.[54] Margery Batman, after five years of service in Charlestown, was to receive a she-goat to help her in starting life.[55] Mary Polly, according to the terms of her indenture, was to serve ten years and then receive “three barrells of corn and one suit of penistone and one suit of good serge with one black hood, two shifts of dowlas and shoes and hose convenient.”[56]

Peter Kalm writes of Pennsylvania in 1748: “A servant maid gets eight or ten pounds a year: these servants have their food besides their wages, but must buy their own clothes, and what they get of these they must thank their master’s goodness for.” He adds that it was cheaper to buy indented servants since “this kind of servants may be got for half the money, and even for less; for they commonly pay fourteen pounds Pennsylvania currency, for a person who is to serve four years.”[57] Even at the beginning of the present century wages had scarcely risen. Samuel Breck writes of two redemptioners whom he purchased in 1817: “I gave for the woman seventy-six dollars, which is her passage-money, with a promise of twenty dollars at the end of three years if she serves me faithfully; clothing and maintenance of course. The boy had paid twenty-six guilders toward his passage-money, which I agreed to give him at the end of three years; in addition to which I paid fifty-three dollars and sixty cents for his passage, and for two years he is to have six weeks’ schooling each year.”[58]

For the protection of both masters and servants the law sometimes interfered and attempted to regulate the matter of wages received at the end of an indenture. In Virginia by the code of 1705 every woman servant was to receive fifteen bushels of Indian corn and forty shillings in money, or the value thereof in goods.[59] In 1748 it was enacted “that every servant, male or female, not having wages, shall, at the expiration of his, or her time of service, have and receive three pounds ten shillings current money, for freedom dues, to be paid by his, or her master, or owner,”[60] and in 1758 the same law was re-enacted, but excepting convicts from the provisions of the Act.[61] In South Carolina all women servants at the expiration of their time were to have “a Wastcoat and Petticoat of new Half-thick or Pennistone, a new Shift of white Linnen, a new Pair of shoes and stockings, a blue apron and two caps of white Linnen.”[62] The laws of Pennsylvania provided that every servant who served faithfully four years should at the expiration of the term of servitude have a discharge and be duly clothed with two complete suits of apparel, one of which should be new,[63] while in Massachusetts and New York it was provided that all servants who had served diligently and faithfully to the benefit of their masters should not be sent away empty.[64] In North Carolina every servant not having yearly wages was to be allowed at the expiration of the term of service three pounds Proclamation money, besides one sufficient suit of wearing clothes.[65] In East New Jersey the law was more liberal and gave every servant two suits of apparel suitable for a servant, one good felling axe, a good hoe, and seven bushels of good Indian corn.[66] West New Jersey gave ten bushels of corn, necessary apparel, two horses, and one axe.[67] In Maryland a woman at the expiration of her term was to have the same provision of corn and clothes as men servants, namely, “a good Cloath suite either of Kersey or broad Cloath, a shift of white Linnen to be new, one new pair of shoes and stockings, two hoes one Ax and three barrˡˡˢ of Indian corn.”[68] A later act specified that women servants were to have “a Waist-coat and Petty-coat of new Half-thick, or Pennistone, a new Shift of White Linen, Shoes and Stockings, a blue Apron, Two Caps of White Linen, and Three Barrells of Indian Corn.”[69]

The test question to be applied to any system of service is—Is the service secured through it satisfactory? It has been seen that a considerable number of servants could be secured through the system of indenture, though probably less than the colonists desired, and that the wages paid them were, as a rule, remarkably low. But it must be said that the service received from indented servants was, as a rule, what might be expected from the class that came to America in that capacity.

It is easy to surmise the character of the service rendered at first in Virginia and the difficulties encountered by employers. Many of the redemptioners had been idlers and vagabonds, and for idlers and vagabonds, there as elsewhere, stringent laws were necessary. In 1610, under the administration of Sir Thomas Gates, various orders were passed with reference to pilfering on the part of launderers, laundresses, bakers, cooks, and dressers of fish.

Even more stringent penalties are attached to purloining from the flour and meal given out for baking purposes.[71]

But it is not alone in Virginia that perplexed employers were found. John Winter, writing to Trelawny from Richmond Island, Maine, under date of July 10, 1639, says of a certain Priscilla:

Winter’s letters and reports to the London Company are as full of his trials with his servants indoors and out, as are the conferences to-day between perplexed employers. Even when fortune smiled on him and one promised well, misfortune overtook her.

It is true that Maine was a remote colony and the difficulty of obtaining good servants was presumably greater than in places more accessible. Yet the same tale of trial comes from Boston and from those whose means, character, and position in society would seem to exempt them from the difficulties more naturally to be expected in other places. Mrs. Mary Winthrop Dudley writes repeatedly in 1636 to her mother, Mrs. Margaret Winthrop, begging her to send her a maid, “on that should be a good lusty seruant that hath skille in a dairy.”[74] But how unsatisfactory the “lusty servant” proved a later letter of Mrs. Dudley shows:

Other members of the Winthrop family also have left an account of their trials of this kind. A generation later, July 7, 1682, Wait Winthrop wrote to Fitz-John Winthrop, “I feare black Tom will do but little seruis. He used to make a show of hanging himselfe before folkes, but I believe he is not very nimble about it when he is alone. Tis good to haue an eye to him, and if you think it not worth while to keep him, eyther sell him or send him to Virginia or the West Indies before winter. He can do something as a smith.”[76] In the third generation John Winthrop, the son of Wait Winthrop, wrote to his father from New London, Connecticut, 1717:

The trials of at least one Connecticut housekeeper are hinted at in an Order of the General Court in 1645, providing that a certain “Susan C., for her rebellious carriage toward her mistress, is to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard labor and coarse diet, to be brought forth the next lecture day to be publicly corrected, and so to be corrected weekly, until order be given to the contrary.”[78]

But it is undoubtedly in the legislation of the colonial period that one finds the best reflection of colonial service, and one may say of it, as Judge Sewall wrote to a friend when sending him a copy of the Statutes at Large for 1684, “You will find much pleasant and profitable Reading in it.”[79] Numerous acts were passed in all the colonies determining the relation between masters and servants, and these laws were most explicit in protecting the interests of both parties—a fact often indicated by the very name of the act, as that of 1700 in Pennsylvania, entitled “For the just encouragement of servants in the discharge of their duty, and the prevention of their deserting their master’s or owner’s service.”[80]

In the legislation in regard to service and servants, it is impossible always to discriminate between the general class of either bound or life servants and the particular class of domestic employees. But the smaller class was comprised in the larger, and household servants had the benefit of all legislation affecting servants as a whole. Few or no laws were passed specifically for the benefit of domestic employees.

These laws worked both ways. On the one hand, they were intended to protect the servant from the selfishness and cruelty of those masters who would be inclined to take advantage of their position; on the other hand, they protected the master who had invested his capital in servants, and asked protection for it at the hands of the law, as he sought protection for any other form of property.

Several general classes of laws are found for the protection of servants. The first provides that no servant, bound to serve his or her time in a province, could be sold out of the province, without his or her consent.[81] A second class of laws compelled masters and mistresses to provide their servants with wholesome and sufficient food, clothing, and lodging;[82] and a third provided that if a servant became ill during the time of his service, his master should be under obligation to care for him, and heavy penalties were sometimes incurred by a master who discharged a servant when sick.[83]

The law went even further and protected servants against unjust cruelty, especially against every form of bodily maiming. If a white servant lost an eye or a tooth at the hands of his master or mistress, he gained his freedom, and could sometimes recover further compensation, if the Court so adjudged.[84] If servants fled from the cruelty of their master, they were to be protected, though notice of such protection was to be sent to the master and the magistrate.[85] In New York if a master or dame tyrannically and cruelly abused a servant, the latter could complain to the constable and overseers, who were instructed to admonish the master on the first offence, and on the second, to protect the servant in the house until relief could be obtained through the Courts.[86] In North Carolina no Christian servant could be whipped without an order from the justice of the peace; if any one presumed so to do, the person offending was to pay forty shillings to the party injured.[87] Immoderate punishment also subjected the master to appear before the County Court to answer for his conduct.[88] When New Jersey became a royal province in 1702, the instructions of the Crown to Lord Cornbury included a provision that he should “endeavor to get a Law past for the restraining of any inhuman Severity, which by ill Masters or Overseers, may be used towards their Christian Servants, and their Slaves, and that Provision be made therein, that the wilfull killing of Indians and Negroes may be punished with Death, and that a fit Penalty be imposed for the maiming of them.”[89] Moreover, in North Carolina complaints of servants against their masters could be heard without formal process of action.[90] In Pennsylvania the law of 1771 provided that every indented servant should obtain a legal residence in the city or place where he or she had first served his or her master sixty days, or if he had afterwards served twelve months in any other place, he was at liberty to choose his residence in either place. In South Carolina a master denying a certificate at the expiration of a servant’s time was to forfeit two pounds.[91]

Important as these provisions were in the interest of the servant, the law protected the master even more carefully and specifically. The great danger to him was in the loss of servants through their escaping from service and being harbored by friendly sympathizers or rival employers. The law dealt rigorously with both classes of offenders. In South Carolina stubborn, refractory, and discontented servants, who ran away before their term of service expired, were obliged to serve their masters three times the period of their absence.[92] In Pennsylvania every servant absenting himself without leave for one day or more was to serve, at the expiration of his time, five days for every day’s absence, and in addition, to give satisfaction to his master for any damages or charges incurred through his absence.[93] In East New Jersey runaways were to serve double the time of their absence, and also to give satisfaction for the costs and damages caused by their absence.[94] In North Carolina runaways who would not tell the name of their master, either because unable to speak English or through obstinacy, were to be committed to jail and advertised for two months. Servants absenting themselves were to serve double time.[95] In South Carolina a servant who ran away was to serve one week for every day’s absence, but the whole time was not to exceed two years.[96] Servants running away with slaves were to be considered felons. In Maryland absenting servants were to serve additional time at the discretion of the Court, ten days, or not exceeding that, for every day’s absence, and to give satisfaction for costs incurred.[97]

The temptation to harbor runaways was great, not so much from philanthropic motives as because of the scarcity of labor, and every colony supplemented its legislation against runaways by corresponding acts carrying penalties for harboring them. In East New Jersey the offender was fined five pounds and was to make full satisfaction to the master or mistress for costs and damages sustained because of the absence, while any person who knowingly harbored or entertained a runaway, “except of real charity,” was to pay the master or mistress of the servant ten shillings for every day’s entertainment and concealment and to be fined at the discretion of the Court.[98] In Connecticut the presumption was that if servants were entertained after nine o’clock at night they were runaways, and the head of the family so entertaining them was to forfeit five shillings to the complainer and five shillings to the town treasurer. Any Indian hiding a runaway was to forfeit forty shillings for every such offence or suffer a month’s imprisonment.[99] In South Carolina runaways were not to be harbored under a penalty of two pounds for every day and night the servant was so entertained, but the total amount forfeited was not to exceed treble the value of the servant’s time remaining to be served.[100] In New York any one proved to have connived at the absence of a servant was to forfeit twenty pounds to the master or dame and five pounds to the Court. Any one knowingly harboring a runaway was to forfeit ten shillings for every day’s entertainment.[101] In Pennsylvania any one concealing a servant forfeited twenty shillings for each day’s concealment.[102] In Rhode Island any person entertaining a servant after nine o’clock at night forfeited five shillings for each offence.[103] In Maryland, by an act of 1692, persons harboring runaways were to forfeit five hundred pounds of tobacco for every hour’s entertainment, one half to the government and one half to the informer.[104] By a later act the person harboring runaways was to forfeit one hundred pounds of tobacco for every hour’s entertainment, one half to go to the public schools and one half to the party aggrieved.[105] This was intended to meet evasions of the previous laws on the part of those who harbored runaways a few hours at a time and then helped them on their way. Free negroes or mulattoes harboring runaways were to forfeit one thousand pounds of tobacco for every such offence, one half for the use of free schools and one half to the party aggrieved.[106] By a later act, servants harboring runaways were to be punished by the magistrate by lashes, not to exceed thirty-nine, on the bare back.[107]

On the other hand, every incentive was held out to assist in the return of runaways. In North Carolina any person who assisted in taking up runaways was rewarded, the reward being gauged by the number of miles away from the master’s house that the servant was taken.[108] In Pennsylvania any one apprehending a runaway servant and returning him or her to the sheriff of the county was to receive ten shillings if the runaway was taken within ten miles of the master’s house and twenty shillings if at a distance of more than ten miles.[109] In Connecticut any Indian who returned a runaway to the nearest authority was to receive as a reward two yards of cloth.[110] In Maryland the allowance was two hundred pounds of tobacco, while Indians were to receive a match coat or its value.[111] Persons in Virginia, Delaware, or the northern parts of America, who apprehended runaways from Maryland, were to receive four hundred pounds of tobacco, and the servant was to reimburse his master by additional servitude.[112] Every precaution to prevent runaways was taken. Indian, negro, and mulatto servants were not to travel without a pass,[113] nor were slaves to leave their plantation without leave, except negroes wearing liveries.[114] In Connecticut servants were not to go abroad after nine o’clock at night,[115] in Massachusetts they were not to frequent public houses,[116] and in South Carolina and Massachusetts innkeepers were not to harbor them.[117]

Yet the life under a master or mistress was often such as to tempt a servant to escape; added to a condition that often involved hard work, poor lodging, and insufficient food and clothing, was the infliction of humiliating corporal punishment in case of disobedience or disorder. In Connecticut a servant could be punished by the magistrate not to exceed ten stripes for one offence.[118] The Rhode Island law was similar.[119] In North Carolina runaways were to receive from the constable as many lashes as the justice of the peace should think fit, “not exceeding the Number of thirty-nine, well laid on, on the Back of such Runaway,” while disobedient servants were to be punished with corporal punishment, not to exceed twenty-one lashes. In cases where free persons suffered punishment by being fined, servants were whipped.[120] In South Carolina a servant for striking his master or mistress was to serve not more than six months’ additional time, or be punished with not more than twenty-one stripes.[121] In Massachusetts and New York any servants who had been unfaithful, negligent, or unprofitable in their service, notwithstanding good usage from their masters, were not to be dismissed until they had made satisfaction according to the judgment of the civil authorities.[122]

In nearly every colony heavy penalties followed attempts to carry on trade or barter with servants. In North Carolina a freeman trading with a servant forfeited treble the value of the goods traded for and six pounds in addition; if unable to pay the fine he was himself sold as a servant. A servant trading or selling the property of his master was to serve his master additional time, the length to be fixed by the Court.[123] In East New Jersey the penalty was five pounds for the first offence and ten pounds for each subsequent one; the offending servant was to be whipped by the person to whom he had tendered such sale, the reward of half a crown being paid by the master or mistress to the person administering the punishment.[124] In Pennsylvania any one trading secretly with a servant was to forfeit to the master three times the value of the goods, and the servant at the expiration of his time was to render satisfaction to the master to double the value of the goods, and, if black, was to be whipped in the most public place in the township.[125] Trading with servants was prohibited in Connecticut[126] and in Massachusetts.[127] In South Carolina any one buying, selling, or bartering with a servant was to forfeit treble the value of the goods and ten pounds to the informer; the offending servant was to be whipped on the bare back in the watch-house at Charleston.[128] In New York servants were forbidden to trade under penalty of fine or corporal punishment. Those trading with servants were to restore the commodities to the master and to forfeit double their value to the poor of the parish.[129] In Maryland the penalty was two thousand pounds of tobacco, one half to go to the king and one half to the master.[130]

Many miscellaneous provisions in different colonies must have seemed oppressive. In New Jersey and South Carolina servants could not marry without the consent of their masters.[131] In Massachusetts no covenant servant in the household with any other could be an office holder.[132] In Pennsylvania innkeepers were forbidden to trust them.[133] In North Carolina servants making false complaints in regard to illness were to serve double the time lost, and the same penalty followed if they were sent to jail for any offence.[134] No slave was to go armed in North Carolina, and if one was found offending, the person making the discovery was to appropriate the weapon for his own use, and the servant was to receive twenty lashes on his or her bare back. One servant on each plantation, however, was exempted from the law, but such an one must carry a certificate of permission.[135] In Massachusetts servants were to be catechised once a week[136] and were not to wear apparel exceeding the quality and condition of their persons or estates under penalty of admonition for the first offence, a fine of twenty shillings for the second, and forty shillings for the third offence.[137]

The obligation of the master to a servant-owning and slave-owning community was recognized in North Carolina in a positive law prohibiting a master from setting free a negro or mulatto on any pretence whatsoever, except for meritorious services to be judged and allowed by the County Court, and even in this case a license was to be previously obtained.[138] In Massachusetts Bay servants were not to be set free until they had served out their time.[139] In Connecticut a slave set free was to be maintained by his master if he came to want.[140]

In view of all these restrictions on servants of a personal, industrial, and political character it seems strange that even any from their number should have been able, at the expiration of their term of service, to break away from the spirit of this bondage and reach a higher position in the social scale; yet many of the redemptioners became in time, especially at the North, respectable and even prominent members of the community.[141] The women often married planters[142] and in turn became the employers of servants. Yet these are the exceptions. For a long time the redemptioners were considered the off-scourings of English cities, and they formed a distinct class in the social order lower than their masters or employers. In view of this fact, a reproach was of necessity attached to all belonging to the class and to the designation applied to them. Their descendants ultimately formed the class of poor whites,—the lowest stratum in the social order whose members were held in contempt even by the negroes.

It has been said that the redemptioners were found in all the colonies, though they were more numerous in the Middle and Southern colonies than in New England. But it was difficult to keep white servants for any length of time in a country where land was cheap and the servant soon in turn became a master.[143] It was undoubtedly this difficulty that led to the substitution for white servants of Indians and negro slaves. Indian servants were apparently more numerous in the New England colonies, while negro slavery gained its strongest foothold in the South.

The employment of Indians as servants grew up naturally in New England and was continued for at least a hundred years.[144] Their presence was regarded as almost providential by the New Englanders, hard pressed for assistance in house and field. When the question of the right and wrong of the matter was suggested by the troubled conscience, an easy answer was found: was it not sin to suffer them longer to maintain the worship of the devil when they were needed so sorely as slaves?[145] But like the redemptioners, their service so eagerly sought often proved unsatisfactory. Hugh Peter wrote to John Winthrop, September 4, 1639, “My wife desires my daughter to send to Hanna that was her mayd, now at Charltowne, to know if shee would dwell with vs, for truly wee are so destitute (hauing now but an Indian) that wee know not what to doe.”[146] More unfortunate still was the young clergyman, the Rev. Peter Thatcher. He records in his diary at Barnstable, May 7, 1679, “I bought an Indian of Mr. Checkley and was to pay 5£ a month after I received her and five pound more in a quarter of a year.” A week later he writes, “Came home and found my Indian girl had liked to have knocked my Theodora on head by letting her fall, whereupon I took a good walnut stick and beat the Indian to purpose till she promised to do so no more.”[147]

In every section negro slavery grew up side by side with white and Indian slavery,[148] though its hold even upon the South was far from strong until the end of the seventeenth century. It is both unnecessary and impossible to discuss in this place the question of slavery[149] and its relation to the larger subject of service. The close of the colonial period saw it firmly established at the South, where it supplanted the system of white servitude, while at the North both black and white slavery gave place to free labor.

The details of the history of domestic service during the colonial period may seem unnecessary to an understanding of domestic service as it is to-day, but an examination of them must show the existence during that period of principles and conditions that must modify the judgment concerning the conditions of to-day. No wish is more often expressed than that it might be possible to return to the Arcadian days when service was abundant, excellent, and cheap. But those days did not exist in America during the colonial period. The conditions at that time bear a marked resemblance to those of to-day. The social position of all servants was lower than that of their employers, and the gulf between the two was more difficult to span. Service was difficult to obtain and unsatisfactory when secured. Servants complained of hard work and ill treatment, and masters of ungrateful servants and inefficient service, and both masters and servants were justified in their complaints. The legal relations between master and servant were explicitly defined as regards length of service, wages paid, and the mutual obligations of both parties to the contract during the period of service. But this very definiteness of the contract was due to the fact that the relationship between the two parties was an arbitrary one and could not have been preserved without this legal assistance. In default of a better one, the system of white servitude may have served its age fairly well; but its restoration, if the restoration were possible, would do nothing to relieve in any way the strain and pressure of present conditions.

CHAPTER IV DOMESTIC SERVICE SINCE THE COLONIAL PERIOD

It has been said that domestic service in America has passed through three distinct phases. The second phase began about the time of the Revolution, when at the North the indented servants as a class were gradually supplanted by free laborers, and at the South by negro slaves who inherited with large interest the reproach attached to the redemptioners. The social chasm that had existed at the North between employer and employee, under the system of bonded servants, disappeared. The free laborers, whether employed in domestic service or otherwise, were socially the equal of their employers, especially in New England and in the smaller towns. They belonged by birth to the same section of the country, probably to the same community; they had the same religious belief, attended the same church, sat at the same fireside, ate at the same table, had the same associates; they were often married from the homes[150] and buried in the family lots of their employers.[151] They were in every sense of the word “help.”[152] A survival of this condition is seen to-day in farming communities, especially at the West. In the South, on the contrary, the social chasm became impassable as negro slavery entirely displaced white labor.

This democratic condition at the North seemed especially noteworthy to European travellers,[153] and it was one to which they apparently never became accustomed. Harriet Martineau, in planning for her American journey, was perplexed by the difficulty of securing a travelling companion. “It would never do,” she says, “as I was aware, to take a servant, to suffer from the proud Yankees on the one hand and the debased slaves on the other.”[154] On arriving here, she found “the study of domestic service a continual amusement,” and what she saw “would fill a volume.”[155] “Boarding-house life,” she says, “has been rendered compulsory by the scarcity of labour,—the difficulty of obtaining domestic service.”[156] But she was quick to appreciate the difference between the spirit of service she found in America and that with which she was familiar in the old world. She writes:

She then gives illustrations to show “of how much higher a character American domestic service is than any which would endure to be distinguished by a badge.”[157]

De Tocqueville, also, found, that “the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between the servant and the master.”[158]

Francis J. Grund was also able to appreciate the difference between external servility and true self-respect, for he writes in 1837: “There are but few native Americans who would submit to the degradation of wearing a livery, or any other badge of servitude. This they would call becoming a man’s man. But, on the other hand, there are also but few American gentlemen who would feel any happier for their servants wearing coats of more than one color. The inhabitants of New England are quite as willing to call their servants ‘helps,’ or ‘domestics,’ as the latter repudiate the title of ‘master’ in their employers.” And he adds, “Neither is an American servant that same indolent, careless, besotted being as an European.” He has another word of praise too for the American servants, “who work harder, and quicker than even in England.”[159]

The absence of livery was a subject of constant comment. William Cobbett, in 1828, asserts that “the man (servant) will not wear a livery, any more than he will wear a halter round his neck.... Neither men nor women will allow you to call them servants, and they will take especial care not to call themselves by that name.” He explains the avoidance of the term “servant” by the fact that slaves were called servants by the English, who having fled from tyranny at home were shy of calling others slaves; free men therefore would not be called servants.[160]

But while the democratic spirit that prevailed during this period found commendation in the eyes of those of similar tendencies, it often evoked only mild surprise or a half sneer. Mrs. Trollope found that “the greatest difficulty in organizing a family established in Ohio, is getting servants, or, as it is there called, ‘getting help,’ for it is more than petty treason to the Republic to call a free citizen a servant.”[161] Chevalier asserted that “on Sunday an American would not venture to receive his friends; his servants would not consent to it, and he can hardly secure their services for himself, at their own hour, on that day.”[162] Samuel Breck considers that “in these United States nothing would be wanting to make life perfectly happy (humanly speaking) had we good servants.”[163] Isabella Bird wrote of Canada in 1854, “The great annoyance of which people complain in this pleasant land is the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants, and the extraordinary specimens of humanity who go out in this capacity.” “The difficulty of procuring servants is one of the great objections to this colony. The few there are know nothing of any individual department of work,—for instance, there are neither cooks nor housemaids, they are strictly ‘helps,’—the mistress being expected to take more than her fair share of the work.”[164] The conditions she found there were the same as in the United States.

Thomas Grattan wrote of the condition:

Grattan’s observations lead him to believe that the democratic spirit is not always to be deplored.

But like all Europeans, he never ceases to be surprised by this spirit, particularly by those manifestations of it that led to active work on the part of the mistress of a home and to the use of the word “help.” “There are no housekeepers,” he writes, “or ladies’ maids. The lady herself does all the duties of the former.... Servants are thus really justified in giving to themselves the favorite designation of ‘helps.’”[167] But he closes a long and interesting chapter on the subject with the prophecy, “They (employers) will, by degrees, give up the employment of native servants who will be in future less likely than even now to submit to their pretensions, and confine themselves to the fast increasing tribes of Irish immigrants.”[168]

Curiously enough nearly forty years earlier Madame d’Arusmont had written of friends who thought of coming to America and urged, “Let them by all means be advised against bringing servants with them. Foreign servants are here, without doubt, the worst; they neither understand the work which the climate renders necessary, nor are willing to do the work which they did elsewhere.”[169] She, like all travellers, found that however subservient domestic servants might be when they left Europe, the first contact with the democratic atmosphere of America wrought a sudden change; subserviency disappeared, and the servant boasted of his equality with all. She explains that those educated in America perceive the difference placed between the gentleman and the laborer by education and conditions, but the foreigner taking a superficial view of the matter sees no difference.[170]

This second period in the history of domestic service continued from about the time of the Revolution until 1850. It was the product of the rapid growth of democratic ideas fostered by the Revolution and the widespread influence of the French philosophical ideas of the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a period chiefly characterized by social and industrial democracy, as the political system was also in its spirit democratic. This democratic industrial spirit showed itself in the universal use at the North of the term “help,” in the absence of liveries and all distinguishing marks of service, in the intolerance on the part of both employer and employee of servility and subserviency of manner, in the bridging of the social chasm between master and servant as long as the free employment of native born Americans continued, and in the hearty spirit of willingness with which service was performed. The results of this democratic régime were the difficulty of securing help, since new avenues of independent work were opening out to women and the class of indented servants had disappeared; the lack of all differentiation in household work, since the servant conferred a favor in “going out to work” and did what she knew how to do without troubling to learn new kinds of work; and, most important, the subtle change that the democratic atmosphere everywhere wrought in the servants who came from Europe.

This condition of free, democratic, native born white service at the North and compulsory slave service at the South continued practically unchanged until about the middle of the century. Between 1850 and 1870 four important political changes occurred which revolutionized the personnel in domestic service and consequently its character. These changes brought about the third period in the history of the subject.

The first of these changes was due to the Irish famine of 1846. Previous to this time the immigration to this country from Ireland had been small, averaging not more than twenty thousand annually between 1820 and 1846. In the decade preceding the famine the average number of arrivals had been less than thirty-five thousand annually. In 1846 the number was 51,752, and this was more than doubled the following year, the report showing 105,536 arrivals in 1847. In 1851 the number of arrivals from Ireland had risen to 221,253. Since that time the number has fluctuated, but between fifty and seventy-five thousand annually come to this country from Ireland.[171] A large proportion of these immigrants—forty-nine per cent during the decade from 1870 to 1880—have been women who were classed as “unskilled laborers.” Two occupations were open to them. One was work in factories where as manufacturing processes became more simple unskilled labor could be utilized. The Irish immigrants, therefore, soon displaced in factories the New England women who had found, as has been seen,[172] new opportunities for work of a higher grade. The second occupation open to the Irish immigrants was household service. Here physical strength formed a partial compensation for lack of skill and ignorance of American ways, and the Irish soon came to form a most numerous and important class engaged in domestic employments.[173]

A second important European change, influencing the condition of domestic service, was the German Revolution of 1848 with the events preceding and resulting from it. Before this period the emigration from Germany had been insignificant, fewer than fifteen thousand having come to this country annually between 1830 and 1840. In 1840, owing to political reasons, the number had risen to 29,704. It soon became evident that the hopes raised by the accession of the new monarch were without foundation, and emigration rapidly increased until the number of emigrants coming to America reached 74,281 in 1847. During the year of the Revolution the number decreased, but the failure of the cause of the revolutionary party and the political apathy that followed again increased the movement towards America. This reached its climax in 1854, when the sympathies of the Court had been openly expressed during the Crimean War in favor of Russian despotism. During this year the number of Germans arriving in this country was 215,009—a number equalled but once since that time, although the number has averaged nearly a hundred and fifty thousand annually during the last decade.[174] A large number of these immigrants have been women, the proportion of women emigrating from Germany being greater than from any other foreign country except Ireland.[175] The ranks of domestic service have been recruited from their number also, the Germans being second only to the Irish as regards the number and proportion engaged in this occupation.[176]

A third political influence affecting the question was the establishment of treaty relations between the United States and China in 1844. This fact and the discovery of gold in California in 1848, together with the building of the Union Pacific railroad in 1867-1869, opened the doors to the immigration of considerable numbers of Chinese. Many of these found their way into domestic service, and on the Pacific coast they became formidable competitors of household servants of other nationalities.[177]

The political and economic conditions in Europe and the breaking down of long-established customs in Asia have thus since 1850 brought to this country large numbers of men and women who have performed the household service previously done by native born Americans. The presence of the Irish in the East, of the Germans in the West, of the Scandinavians in the Northwest, and of the Chinese on the Pacific coast has thus introduced a new social, as well as a new economic, element at the North. It has led to a change in the relation of employer and employee; the class line which was only faintly drawn in the early part of the century between employer and “help” has been changed into a caste line which many employers believe it to their interest to preserve. The native born American fears to lose social position by entering into competition with foreign labor.

While this change, owing to political conditions in the Old World, was taking place at the North in the character of the service, a similar change was taking place at the South growing out of the abolition of slavery in 1863. The negroes who had previously performed all domestic service for their personal expenses have since then received for the same service a small remuneration in money. This fact prevents now as effectually as during the slavery period any competition in domestic service on the part of native born white employees. It does not prevent all competition on the part of foreign born white employees, since prejudice against the negro does not exist in Europe owing to the fact that negro slavery has not prevailed there. The effects of these great movements upon the nature and personnel of domestic service will be discussed later in considering its present condition. They have had a direct and conspicuous influence on the condition of domestic service and even in the use of the term applied to those who engage in it.

But other political influences more subtle and possibly more far-reaching in their effect have been at work. Our loose naturalization laws, and the determining of the qualifications for the right of suffrage by as many standards as there are states, have made the enormous number of men coming to this country annually an easy prey to scheming politicians and demagogues. The labor vote, the Irish vote, the German vote, have been flattered and sought by party managers until the wage-earning man feels that “like Atlas of old he carries the world on his shoulders.” If the laboring man feels the weight of the world, his wife and daughter believe that some share of the burden rests on them. The democratic tendencies of the country, the political practices of the day, have everywhere broken down the high wall of separation between employer and employee. They are subversive even in the household of that patriarchal relationship that has been driven from every stronghold but this.

While the political movements of the century have thus changed the personnel of domestic service in America, the development of the material resources of the country has affected its status. Before the present century employees of every kind were in a sense stationary. This was due partly to the influence of the English poor laws; partly to the system of indenture which bound a servant for seven, five, or four years, and to the system of slavery which bound the servant for life; partly to the system of apprenticeship which made the servant a member of the family of his master; partly to the custom prevailing in the country districts and small towns for unmarried workmen in all industries to board with their employers; and partly to the lack of facilities for cheap and easy means of communication between different sections of the country. There was no mobility of labor as regards either employment or place of employment—a fact true alike of domestic service and of other occupations. But this condition of affairs gradually changed. As has been seen, indented servants disappeared and every employee was free to break as well as to make an engagement for service. The establishment of the factory system of manufactures and the consequent substitution of mechanical for skilled processes of labor broke down the system of apprenticeship, and workmen of every occupation, except domestic service, ceased to be members of the families of their employers. A mobility of labor was made possible such as could not have been secured under the old system. At a later time the great era of railroad development and similar enterprises gave opportunity for a certain mobility as regards place of employment. The tide of western emigration due to the discovery of gold and the cheapness of western land caused much shifting of labor among the non-capitalist class, and this was increased as means of communication were rendered more easy. The establishment of companies to encourage foreign immigration with the object of developing the material resources of the country was another weight in the scale in favor of greater mobility of labor as regards both place and employment. The abolition of slavery removed the last important legal barrier against perfect mobility.

All of these industrial movements have been important factors in changing the condition and character of domestic service. It is true, in a general sense, that every great change in economic conditions affects all occupations. But domestic service has through these causes been affected in certain specific ways. The employee who disliked housework, but to whom no other occupation had been open, could go into a factory or a mill, since no time was consumed in learning the simple processes of mechanical work. Every invention formed the basis for a new occupation. Domestic service had a hundred competitors in a field where before the era of inventions it had stood alone. Moreover, these new occupations required little skill, no preparation, and possessed the charm of novelty. Again, the rapid development of railroad interests, with the increase of competition and consequent lowering of passenger rates, often influenced families emigrating to the West to take with them their trusted employees. The same fact made it possible for women seeking new employments to go from place to place in ways unthought of in the early part of the century.

In view of these changed and changing economic conditions it may be said that the immobility of labor, which has seemed to some economists so great an obstacle to the industrial advancement of women,[178] has practically ceased to exist in the case of domestic service. In fact, industrial development has so far changed conditions that the problem has now come to be how to make this form of labor not more mobile, but more stable. One illustration of this is found in the fact that when seven hundred domestic employees represented on the schedules were asked how many of them had ever been engaged in any other occupation, twenty-seven per cent replied that they had. The mobility as to the place of labor was found to be even greater. Twenty-seven per cent of the native born employees did not reside in the same state in which they were born, and adding to these the number of foreign born, it was found that sixty-eight per cent did not reside in their native country or state. Moreover, this statement is below the truth as it does not take into account the number of changes made within a single year and refers to only one change from place of birth to present residence.[179]

An indication of these various changes in the condition of domestic service during these different periods is seen in the history of the word “servant.” As used in England and in law at the time of the settlement of the American colonies it signified any employee, and no odium was in any way attached to the word.[180] But five things led to its temporary disuse: first, the reproach connected with the word through the character and social rank of the redemptioners; second, the fact that when the redemptioners gave place at the South to negro slaves the word “servant” was transferred to this class,[181] and this alone was sufficient to prevent its application to whites;[182] third, the levelling tendencies that always prevail in a new country; fourth, the literal interpretation of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence; and fifth, the new social and political theories resulting from the introduction of French philosophical ideas. At the North the word “help” as applied especially to women superseded the word “servant,” while at the South the term “servant” was applied only to the negro. From the time of the Revolution, therefore, until about 1850 the word “servant” does not seem to have been generally applied in either section to white persons of American birth.[183]

Since the introduction of foreign labor at the middle of the century, the word “servant” has again come into general use as applied to white employees, not, however, as a survival of the old colonial word, but as a reintroduction from Europe of a term signifying one who performs so-called menial labor, and it is restricted in its use, except in a legal sense, to persons who perform domestic service. The present use of the word has come not only from the almost exclusive employment of foreigners in domestic service, but also because of the increase of wealth and consequent luxury in this country, the growing class divisions, and the adoption of many European habits of living and thinking and speaking.[184]

These simple historical facts are one explanation of the unwillingness of American women to engage in work stigmatized by an offensive term applied to no other class of laborers.

In studying the question of domestic service, therefore, the fact cannot be overlooked that certain historical influences have affected its conditions; that political revolutions have changed its personnel, and industrial development its mobility. It is as impossible to dream of restoring the former condition of household service as it is of restoring former household employments, and neither is to be desired. In each case the question is one of preparing for the next step in the process of evolution, not of retrograding toward a condition impossible to restore. Any attempt to secure a change for the better in the present condition of domestic service must be ineffective if it does not take into consideration these historic aspects of the subject.

CHAPTER V ECONOMIC PHASES OF DOMESTIC SERVICE [185] — TABLE I Place of Birth of Employees — TABLE II Domestic Employees in the United States, 1890 — TABLE III Proportion of Persons of Foreign Birth in the United States — TABLE IV Place of Birth of Domestic Employees — TABLE V Number of Foreign Born in Domestic Service — TABLE VI Domestic Servants and Women compared with those in Gainful Occupations — TABLE VII Average Weekly Wages by Geographical Section — TABLE VIII Average Weekly and Daily Wages by Occupations — TABLE IX Nature of Service rendered — TABLE X Comparison of Wages paid — TABLE XI Classified Daily and Weekly Wages by Occupations — TABLE XII [209] Average Weekly and Daily Wages by Occupations — TABLE XIII Classified Weekly Wages by Occupations — TABLE XIV Average Weekly Wages by Occupations — TABLE XV Classified Annual Salaries of Women Teachers — TABLE XVI Average Annual Salaries of Women Teachers

The attempt has been made in the foregoing chapters to indicate the extent to which domestic employments and domestic service have been influenced by industrial and political events arising outside of the household, and apparently having little or no connection with it. That domestic service is amenable to some of the general economic laws and conditions which affect other occupations and that it is also governed by economic laws developed within itself will perhaps be evident from an examination of a few of these economic conditions and principles. These may be stated for the sake of brevity in the form of propositions.

The first group of propositions to be suggested concerns the number and distribution of persons of foreign birth engaged in domestic service.

(1) A large proportion of the domestic employees in the United States are of foreign birth. This is evident from the following table prepared from the schedules sent out:[186]

The statement may be more fully illustrated from the Eleventh Census, which shows that the number of foreign born in domestic service is 30.86 per cent of the entire number.[187] The geographical distribution of the different classes of domestic employees is seen from Table II on the following page.

Another illustration of the same point is found by an examination of the relative number of native born and foreign born domestic employees in the individual states and territories. In nine states and territories the number of foreign born domestic employees exceeds the number of native born white employees,[188] in sixteen about one half of the white domestic employees are of foreign birth,[189] in twenty-four states and territories the number of native born white employees largely exceeds the foreign born,[190] while in fifteen states colored employees are in excess.[191] It will be seen that the states in which the number of native born white domestic employees exceeds the number of the foreign born are those states having relatively a small number of foreign born residents.[192] A still more specific illustration is found in the experience of one state. In Massachusetts in 1885, the foreign born domestic servants formed 60.24 per cent of the entire number.[193]

These different illustrations seem to show the truth of the proposition stated.

(2) The converse of the preceding proposition is also true—the concentration of women of foreign birth engaged in remunerative occupations is on domestic service.

The Eleventh Census shows that, in 1890, 59.37 per cent of all foreign white women at work were engaged in domestic and personal service. This leaves only 40.63 per cent to be distributed among all other gainful occupations.[200] A specific illustration in the case of an individual state is seen in Massachusetts. Here the percentage of the foreign born in the entire population is 27.13, while, as stated above, the number of foreign born women in domestic service is 60.24 per cent.[201]

(3) The foreign born population as a class seek the large cities.

In 1890 the persons of foreign birth in the United States formed 14.77 per cent of the entire population. But of the total foreign population, 44.13 per cent was found in the one hundred and twenty-four cities having a population of twenty-five thousand or more.[202]

(4) The foreign countries having the largest absolute representation in the largest cities are Ireland, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and Canada and Newfoundland. The following table shows the relative number of persons born in these countries who are found in the United States as a whole, and in the large cities:

(5) The foreign countries having the largest absolute and relative representation in domestic service are, in order, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Norway, Great Britain, and Canada and Newfoundland. This will be evident from the following table, which indicates the place of birth of all persons of foreign birth engaged in domestic service and the per cent of each nationality so engaged:

Similar results were reached through individual schedules sent out. The returns as made by employers and employees show that the place of birth of foreign born employees and the relative percentages are as follows:

This group of five propositions in regard to the number and distribution of the foreign born engaged in domestic service seems to indicate that in this country, with the exception of the sections employing colored servants, domestic service is as a rule performed by persons of foreign birth belonging to a few well-defined classes as regards nationality, who prefer city to country life. The facts given are an understatement of the influence exerted on domestic service by persons of foreign extraction, since they do not take into consideration the factor of foreign parentage.

A second group of propositions may be suggested in regard to the general distribution of domestic employees.

(1) The number of domestic servants is absolutely and relatively small in agricultural and sparsely settled states.

This will be evident by the reference to the accompanying chart, which shows the number of persons to each domestic servant in each of the states. The states last in the list, where the smallest relative number of servants is employed, are all large in area, and as a rule have the smallest population in proportion to the area of settlement. This condition is probably due to the two facts that all housework is as a rule performed without remuneration by housewives, since they are more free from social and other interruptions than are women in cities, and also to the aversion of domestics as a class to country life.

(2) The number of domestic servants is absolutely and relatively large in those states containing a large urban population.

This is also made evident by the diagram. Forty-nine of the fifty largest cities in the United States are found in the first thirty-four states in the list; only one of the fifty is found in the last fifteen states. The fact is apparently most clearly shown in the case of the District of Columbia, which has an almost exclusively urban population and ranks first with reference to the number of servants employed. The condition here, however, is due not so much to its urban character as to the employment of colored help and the fact that the city contains an abnormally large number of temporary residents requiring a disproportionate amount of service. The truth of the proposition is better indicated by the examples of New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which stand nearly at the head of the list and contain seventeen of the fifty largest cities.

(3) The aggregate wealth of a state has little appreciable effect on the relative number of domestic servants employed.

This is evident from a study of the relative true and assessed valuation of real and personal property in the different states.[203] In more than one half the states it has no apparent connection whatever with the relative number of servants.

(4) The per capita wealth of a state has, with the exception of the Southern states as a class, a somewhat important bearing on the relative number of servants employed.

This will be seen from an examination of the per capita assessed valuations of real and personal property in the various states.[204] The rank of each state in the class of per capita wealth and in the relative number of domestic servants employed, with the exception named, does not vary materially. The variation in the Southern states is due to the presence of negro employees. The extremely low wages paid by employers enables them to command the services of a larger number of persons for the same expenditure of money than is possible at the North.

These facts may be considered as indicative in a general way of the truth of the current opinion that an increase in income generally shows itself first in the employment of additional service. They prove nothing absolutely on this point, however, as they are too general in character.

(5) Domestic employees are found in the largest numbers, relatively and absolutely, in the large cities. The fifty largest cities in the United States contain 18.04 per cent of the total population of the country. They have, however, 32.32 per cent of the total number of domestic servants. To put the same fact in another way, domestic servants constitute 2.32 per cent of the total population, but 4.07 per cent of the population of the fifty largest cities. The force of gravity exerted, therefore, by the large cities seems to act with nearly twice the power on the class of domestic employees that it does on the population as a whole.

The conclusion seems to follow that in general employers in large cities have less difficulty in securing servants than have persons living elsewhere, but that they are practically restricted in their choice to those of foreign birth. The conclusion does not follow that these employers have less difficulty than have others in dealing with the question of domestic service, since the facts given concern only the number of servants, not the quality of service.

(6) The proportion of persons engaged in domestic service varies with geographical location and prevailing industry.

This fact is indicated by the chart, which shows that in Southern cities, where the colored population is large, and in New York and Boston, which are ports of entry and therefore able to secure a large number of foreign born servants, the proportion of servants to the total population is large. In cities where the leading occupation is manufacturing, as Lowell, Paterson, and Fall River, the proportion of servants is small. In cities where the industrial conditions are similar the proportions are similar.

The same fact may be illustrated in two other ways. In Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville,—the five cities having the largest number of domestic employees in proportion to the population,—the domestic employees constitute in each city more than fourteen per cent of the entire number of persons engaged in all gainful occupations. In these five cities more than one third of all women engaged in remunerative occupations are in domestic service. On the other hand, in Camden, Trenton, Lowell, Paterson, and Fall River,—the five cities having the smallest number of domestic employees in proportion to the population,—the per cent of domestic employees with reference to the total number of persons engaged in all gainful occupations is less than seven, while in Lowell and Paterson only ten per cent and in Fall River only seven per cent of all women engaged in remunerative occupations are in domestic service. The following table will show these contrasts:

(7) Neither per capita wealth nor aggregate wealth has an appreciable influence in determining the number of servants in cities.

Three illustrations of this are seen: (1) Washington, Richmond, Atlanta, Memphis, and Nashville rank respectively as regards per capita wealth, 13, 27, 19, 24, and 41, although they are the five cities that head the list in the proportion of servants to the total population; (2) Lowell and Fall River are at the foot of the list as regards the proportion of servants, but rank 10 and 12 in per capita wealth; (3) Nashville ranks fifth in the number of servants and Paterson forty-ninth, while both rank nearly the same in point of wealth.[205] There are indeed many instances where there is apparent connection between these two conditions, but they seem rather to be illustrations of the following point:

(8) The prevailing industry of a city, rather than its population or wealth, determines the number of domestic employees.

This conclusion seems to follow naturally as a result of the two previous propositions, but a few other facts in support of it may be mentioned. In eleven of the fifty principal cities the proportion of domestic servants to the total population is smaller than is the proportion in the states in which they are severally located.[206] The leading occupation in each of these cities is some form of manufacturing, and in each of them the proportion of persons engaged in manufacturing processes is larger than, with few exceptions, in the other cities. This fact explains the apparent contradiction between this statement and the one that domestic servants are found in the largest proportions in the largest cities.

That manufacturing industries tend to decrease the number of domestic employees in a city is both a cause and a result. The competition in industry draws women from domestic service, and at the same time a large part of the population in a manufacturing city is unable or does not care to employ large numbers of servants. It has been seen, however, that several of the manufacturing cities rank comparatively high in per capita wealth.

It seems possible in view of the facts stated in this second group of propositions to draw these conclusions. In states containing a relatively high urban population it is possible for wealth to command the services of a large proportion of persons for work in domestic service. But in cities where wealth comes into competition with manufacturing industries the proportion of domestic servants is small. Where such competition does not exist the proportion is large. In other words, persons are willing to enter domestic service for a consideration in cities where no other avenues of work are open to them with the qualifications they possess. They are unwilling to do so where such openings do exist.

A third group of propositions remains to be considered concerning the subject of wages. They may be thus stated:

(1) Wages in domestic service vary in different sections according to the economic conditions of the several localities.

This principle is illustrated by Table VII on the preceding page based on a classification of the returns received through individual schedules relating to 2,545 employees.

The difference indicated apparently conforms to the general variation in wages in different sections indicated by the Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor,[207] and by examination of a considerable number of reports of various state bureaus of labor. The slight exception in the case of the wages of men on the Pacific coast is accidental, owing to the small number of returns.

(2) Skilled labor commands higher wages than unskilled labor.

This will be evident from Table VIII on the following page based on the schedules received from employers and employees and the returns from a Boston employment bureau.

In every instance it is seen that it is the skilled laborer—the cook—who commands the highest wages. The general servant who is expected to unite in herself all the functions of all the other employees named in the list becomes, on account of this fact, an unskilled worker, and, therefore, receives the lowest wages. The same principle holds true in the case of the seamstress and the laundress, the gardener and the choreman. It is difficult to make a deduction in the case of men employed in household service, since no universal custom prevails, as with women employees, in regard to adding to the wages paid in money, board, lodging, and other personal expenses.

A corollary to the proposition may be added. The skilled laborer is a better workman than the unskilled laborer. The question was asked of employers, “What is the nature of the service rendered? Is it ‘excellent,’ ‘good,’ ‘fair,’ or ‘poor’?” The replies show that in proportion to the number of answers the largest percentage of service characterized as “excellent” is rendered by cooks, while the largest percentage characterized as “poor” is given by the general servants. These are, it is true, matters of opinion; and without a fixed standard, which it is impossible to secure, such judgments can have no absolute value. But the fact is of interest as showing the opinion of a large number of housekeepers. The following table will show the results in regard to these two classes of employees:

(3) The foreign born in domestic service receive higher wages than the native born.

This was found to be true in every class of occupations, in every section, in the case of both men and women, and in the returns made by both employers and employees. But two trifling exceptions were found, both accidental. The principle cannot of course be stated absolutely as the facts at command are far from exhaustive, but so striking a uniformity cannot be considered purely accidental. An explanation is found in three facts: (1) the preference of the foreign born for the large cities, where wages in domestic service are higher than in the country; (2) the large proportion of negroes among the native born; (3) the relatively better class of foreign born than of native born women who enter domestic service. This statement must be made somewhat dogmatically here, since its proof demands a discussion of the entire subject of the unwillingness of native born women to enter domestic service.

(4) The wages of men engaged in domestic service are higher than the wages of women.

This will be evident by reference to Table VII and to Table VIII. Two things, however, must be borne in mind: first, that nearly all the men classified as cooks are employed on the Pacific coast, where wages are relatively high; second, that forty per cent of the men in domestic service do not receive board and lodging in addition to wages in money, while only two per cent of women so employed, principally laundresses, do not receive board and lodging. But although these facts modify the discrepancy between the wages of men and women, they do not wholly remove it. Whether the difference is as great as in other occupations cannot be stated.

(5) A tendency is found towards an increase in wages paid by employers, as is seen in Table X on the following page.

An interesting historical illustration of the same fact is given in a summary of wages and prices in Massachusetts from 1752 to 1860. In 1815, the first time the work of women is mentioned specifically, domestic servants received with board $.50 per week, while at the same time women were able to earn as papermakers $6.50 a week.[208]

(6) The wages received in domestic service are relatively and sometimes absolutely higher than the average wages received in other wage-earning occupations open to women.

A comparison may be made between the wages received by domestic employees and by two other classes—teachers in representative city schools and the wage-earning women included in the investigations made by the Commissioner of Labor. As illustrating the wages received in domestic service, the following tables are given, showing (1) the classified weekly and daily wages received and (2) the average weekly and daily wages with the percentages receiving more or less than the average. These facts are taken from the general schedules. Similar tables are given showing a somewhat higher rate of wages in all domestic occupations in the special city of Boston.

The following tables show the classified and average wages paid in the principal occupations as reported by a Boston employment bureau:

It is seen from Table XII that the average weekly wages in domestic service are $3.23—a fair average in this case, since forty-eight per cent receive more than the average and fifty-two per cent the same or less than the average. The average domestic employee, therefore, is able to earn in money during the year $167.96—a fair estimate, since in seventy-five cases out of every hundred the vacation granted women employees during the year is given without loss of wages.[210] This forms, however, but a part of the annual earnings. To this sum must be added board and lodging, fuel and light. For the equivalent in quality and quantity to that furnished by the employer the employee would in general be obliged to pay for board, lodging, and other incidental expenses at a reasonable estimate five dollars per week, or $250 annually, deducting board for two weeks’ vacation. The total annual earnings of a domestic employee, therefore, amount to nearly $420. To this the negative facts must be added that there is no expense for laundry work, and that the work involves few personal expenses in the way of clothing, and that these necessary expenses are often partially met through gifts from the employer. Again, the position entails no expenditures for car fares in going to and from work, or other demands such as are made in a business way by other occupations, and it involves no outlay for appliances for work, as a sewing-machine, type-writer, text-books, etc. Moreover, no investment of capital is necessary in learning the principles of the work, since employers have thus far been willing to make of their own homes training-schools for employees. The domestic employee is therefore never obliged to pay back either the capital invested in preparing for her work or the interest on that amount. It thus seems possible for the average household employee to save annually nearly $150 in an occupation involving no outlay or investment of capital in any way, and few personal expenses.

A comparison may be made between these wages and the annual salaries received in sixteen representative cities by the women teachers in the public schools. Tables XV and XVI show the annual classified and average salaries received.[211]

The concentration of salaries is seen to be on those between $400 and $500, the average salary being $545. This sum represents the full amount of wages received. To ascertain the amount it is possible to save annually there must be deducted at least $260 for board and lodging, and $25 for laundry expenses, leaving a cash balance of $260. Out of this sum, however, must come other necessary expenses, as the outfit for work,—books, stationery, etc.,—travelling expenses, car fares, society fees, etc., and a large item for clothing. There should also be deducted the interest on the capital invested in securing the education demanded in preparation for the work. If all of these items are considered, and the greater social demands entailed by the position, it seems possible for the average domestic employee to save at least as much money as the average teacher in the city schools. This comparison is probably relatively higher in favor of the teacher than it should be, since in the average wages for domestic employees are included the wages received in agricultural districts, where wages are lower than in cities. It is also a comparison between skilled workers on the one hand, and on the other hand an occupation in some of the subdivisions of which the laborers are unskilled.

It has, unfortunately, not been possible to compare the wages received in the same city by teachers and domestic employees. A comparison, however, can be made between the wages received in Boston for domestic service and by the teachers in the public schools in the neighboring city of Cambridge.

The average wages received by a cook in a private family in Boston are, as has been seen by Table XIV, $4.45. This judgment is based on five hundred and seventy-four returns, and is an exact average, since fifty per cent receive more than that amount, and fifty per cent the same or less than that. She therefore earns annually $231.40 plus $275 for board, lodging, fuel, light, and laundry expenses, or $506.40.

Fifty-six per cent of the teachers in the city schools in Cambridge earn annually $620, or, deducting $285 for board, etc., for fifty-two weeks, $335 in money. This is $103 more than is received by the Boston cook, but out of this must come numerous expenses entailed by the position, from which the domestic employee is exempt. The cash annual savings in the two cases cannot vary materially.

It will also be seen by reference to Tables XV and XVI that the Boston cook earns absolutely more than does the average city teacher in Albany, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, Paterson, Rochester, and Syracuse.

A second comparison is suggested by the investigations conducted by the Department of Labor. Through these it was found that the annual cash earnings of the working-women in twenty-two typical cities are $272.45.[212] This average takes into consideration time lost—a factor which does not enter into domestic employments except in a casual way. The annual earnings, therefore, of the class of women represented by the Report are much less than those of the domestic employee. The same point is also illustrated by a comparison of the amounts saved in the two occupations. In eleven cities investigated by the Department of Labor the average amount saved was less than $50; in nine cities it was $50, but under $100, while in only two cities was it more than $100, the highest average amount being $111.[213] As has been suggested, the highest of these averages is small in comparison with the amount it is possible to save in domestic service.

No question in regard to earnings saved was asked on the schedule sent to employees, but many statements on this point were voluntarily made by employees.[214] The question as to comparative amounts saved has also been asked the cashiers of banks in small cities and towns where factories are found and the personnel of depositors is known by the officials of the banks. No records are of course kept, but the opinion has been several times expressed that the factory employees do not save as much, as a class, as do domestic employees. In one place, where about two thousand factory employees are found, it was stated that no woman employee had a sum to her credit as large as had been deposited by a domestic.

A corollary follows from this proposition. High wages alone are not sufficient to counterbalance the inducements offered in other occupations where wages are relatively or absolutely lower but whose special advantages are deemed more desirable.

(7) The wages paid in domestic service are on the average high, but the occupation offers few opportunities for advancement in this direction.

An examination of Table XI shows but one instance, with the exception of nurses, where the weekly cash wages reach $10.00 per week, and only nine others where they rise above $7.00. In the two occupations the wages in which have been compared with those in domestic service, while the general average wages are low, it is possible to reach through promotion a comparatively high point. The fact that the wage plane is a high one is one inducement for women of average ability to enter the occupation. On the other hand, the fact that the wage limit, high as it is, is soon reached must act as a barrier in the case of others.

(8) The amount of time unemployed is less in domestic service than in nearly every other occupation.

The element of time unemployed is an important factor in determining annual earnings. While in nearly every occupation there is a limit to the demand, in domestic service there is no limit and hence few persons are necessarily without employment. The most important illustration of this point is derived from the report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor on the unemployed in that state in 1885.[215] Of the total number of women in the state engaged in remunerative occupations at the time, thirty per cent were unemployed. These were distributed as regards occupations as follows:

But if the number of unemployed is compared with the total number employed in each industry, a still lower percentage of unemployed is found in domestic service. A comparison with other wage earners will make clear this point. The percentage of the unemployed in the leading industries in which women are engaged was as follows:

The demand for domestic servants varies in the different states, but the condition of the unemployed in this occupation in Massachusetts may perhaps be considered fairly typical of that in other localities.

(9) High wages are maintained without the aid of strikes or combinations on the part of the employees.

In but five states are strikes reported among domestic employees;[216] they number but twenty-two and involve less than seven hundred persons, all of them being connected with hotels or restaurants, and nine tenths of them men. Only two instances of permanent organization among this class have come to notice, and neither of these has had as its object the increase of wages. The strike in domestic service assumes the form of a “notice,” is individual in character, and is able to accomplish its object without the organized effort considered necessary in other occupations where the supply of laborers is greater than the demand.

This group of nine propositions concerning wages it is believed will suggest three conclusions: the conformity of wages in domestic service to certain general economic laws, the fact that the wage factor alone does not determine the number of persons in the occupation, and the existence of a few conditions which affect, perhaps unconsciously, the willingness of the women to engage in this work.

The three groups of propositions stated it is believed will suggest the conclusions that the general economic condition of the country has an appreciable influence on the condition of domestic service, both as regards the character and number of persons engaged and the compensation given for service required. It must follow therefore that many questions must arise connected with the employment, which the individual employer cannot settle from an exclusively personal point of view.

CHAPTER VI DIFFICULTIES IN DOMESTIC SERVICE FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE EMPLOYER

The understanding of domestic service has been seen to involve the consideration of many historical changes both industrial and political, and an examination of the general economic laws to which it is amenable. It involves also a study of the economic conditions that surround the average family, and the problems that confront it when undertaking to deal with the question of domestic service.

The average family reached through the schedules was found to consist of about five persons,[217] exclusive of servants. Its members have kept house eighteen years,[218] they have boarded two years and a half,[219] and at some time during their housekeeping experience they have been without servants. They employ at the present time two servants and a half, or rather, they command the full time of two persons and half the time of the third, to whom they pay weekly for service rendered, on the basis indicated in the schedule of average wages, $10,[220] exclusive of board and lodging, or $500 annually, the expense of service exclusive also of waste, breakage, and general wear and tear of household furniture and appliances. In about one third of all the families with servants men are employed in some capacity about the house; in one family in every seven the number of servants is the same as the number of persons in the family or exceeds it, while in the average family one servant renders service to every two persons.

When the average family undertakes the task of dealing with domestic servants the difficulties that confront it are many and serious.

It has first the task of assimilating into its domestic life those who are of a different nationality and who consequently hold different industrial, social, religious and political beliefs. More than one half of all domestic employees are of foreign birth or belong to another race,[221] who come not only from the prominent European countries but also from the remote corners of the globe,[222] where all conditions are totally unlike those of America. Moreover this number does not include the very large percentage of those who are themselves native born, but who are the children of foreign born parents and have inherited to a certain extent un-American characteristics; 4.02 per cent of the domestic employees in this country do not speak the English language.[223] Those who come to this country, often with preconceived and erroneous ideas as to the independence prevailing here, expecting high wages in return for inexperienced and unskilled labor,[224] must be trained in all the ways not only of American life, but of the family of the individual employer. It has been found difficult to assimilate into our political system the large foreign element coming here, though this system is simple and lends itself readily to such assimilation, as our history has thus far proved. It is far more difficult to assimilate this mass into the infinitely more complex and delicate organism—the modern household. It is not strange that congestion and inflammation so often result from the attempt. The question is one also that becomes more difficult as the proportion of foreign employees increases.

A second difficulty is that of the spirit of restlessness which everywhere prevails among working classes, though not confined to them, and the consequent brief tenure of service. The average length of service of a domestic servant is found to be less than a year and a half and this in many cases and in some localities is a high average. In the East, in the vicinity of the great lakes, on the Pacific coast, and in some sections of the South, proximity to popular summer or winter resorts lessens the average duration of service. In the South, the cotton-picking season draws many women from household work, as they are able at that time to earn enough money to enable them to live for some months in idleness. In other localities, the hop-picking season, the berry-picking season, and the grape-picking season all offer temporary inducements for girls to leave domestic service. In still other places the canning factory, the pickle factory, and the fruit-drying establishment successfully offer temporary competition. To the question asked of employees, “Have you ever had any other occupation besides domestic service?” twenty-eight per cent answered “Yes.” This at first might seem to indicate a decided preference for domestic service, but a closer examination shows that more often it means that housework is taken up when the berry-picking and the fruit-canning season is over, when the mill or the factory has closed in a dull time or when the hurry of plantation work is ended at the South. A similar indication of this restlessness is found in the replies given by employers to the question, “How many servants have you employed since you have been housekeeping?” Twenty-five per cent did not answer the question definitely and of these one half state as their reason the fact that the number was too great to remember. “Their name is legion,” answer fifteen housekeepers, a series of exclamation points tells the story for others, “infinity-minus,” writes one, and still another bids the compiler “read her answer in the stars.”

This condition of affairs is not to be wondered at. That spirit of restlessness, nervous discontent, and craving for excitement which foreigners find characteristic of all who breathe American air is not confined to business men and society women—it permeates the kitchen, the nursery, the laundry, and every part of the household. Among employers the mode of life tends more and more towards a winter in California, a summer in Europe, an autumn in the mountains, and a spring in Florida. On both sides of the Hudson there are magnificent country houses deserted because their owners prefer the excitement of city life, the attractions of Bar Harbor, or the society at Newport. The towns on the Hudson are nearly stationary as regards population, though possessing every natural advantage, while the large cities are powerful magnets drawing from every direction. Domestic service cannot remain unaffected by these characteristics of the age. A new situation is often like a voyage to Europe so desired by others—it gives change, excitement, new experiences, and it is often the only way in which these can be secured. A summer engagement at the sea-shore, among the mountains, or at the springs is often as eagerly sought as is the height of the season at Saratoga or among the Berkshires by persons whose opportunities for change are far less restricted. The occupations temporarily open at the time of the hop-picking season, or the fruit-canning season, offer the attraction of large numbers of fellow-workers in the company of whom “a good time” is expected.

The tenure of service also apparently varies somewhat with the size of the place, the average duration being longer in cities of from ten thousand to eighty thousand inhabitants than in smaller towns or larger cities. In small towns the desire for city life shortens the terms of service. In the largest cities, as New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, the average time is shortened by the fact that employers are often obliged to engage as a temporary expedient persons who have just arrived in this country; while it is also seen to be true that there is greater difficulty than in small cities in obtaining reliable testimonials.

It is not strange, therefore, that reasonable, intelligent, and competent employers have difficulties to meet that lie entirely without the domain of their own households, and that many persons who twenty-five years ago experienced no difficulty whatever find to-day serious trouble in retaining their employees.

A third difficulty is the fact that employers are so often obliged to engage for skilled labor the assistance of unskilled laborers. Many who seek employment as servants do not know even the names of the household tools they are obliged to use—still less are they acquainted with their uses. A part of this ignorance and lack of skill is due to the prevalence of the old idea that anybody can do everything—a theory abandoned in most occupations but still dominating the household. Household employments and service are still generally considered occupations that any one can “pick up,” but the picking-up process has resulted in the household, as elsewhere, in unscientific, haphazard work and has seldom produced expert workmen. The Superintendent of the Census wrote in 1880, “The organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained (between the different parts of the service).”[225] In confirmation of this statement is the testimony of a large number of employees to the effect that they have become domestic servants because they had not education enough to do anything else.[226] From this general conception of the nature of household service several things result: first, few opportunities exist for learning household duties in a systematic way; second, if the opportunities were created, few would avail themselves of them so long as this low estimate of the occupation prevails; third, many housekeepers are obliged to conduct in their own households a training-school on a limited scale; fourth, the expense is far greater than it should be, since unskilled labor is always improvident of time and materials;[227] fifth, the hygienic results of “instinctive cookery” and “picked up” knowledge are often seen in ill health and a derangement of household affairs erroneously attributed to other causes.

A fourth difficulty arises when the seemingly inevitable annual change of employees comes. Four courses are open to the housekeeper: (1) she may employ a new servant without asking for a recommendation, (2) she may take the recommendation of previous employers, (3) she may consult an employment bureau, (4) she may advertise.

Few persons are willing to adopt the first expedient and take a stranger into their service, not to speak of their family life, without some recommendation.[228]

But the second course open—taking the recommendation of others—is scarcely more practicable. There must always be a difference in standards, and “excellent” to one may mean “fair” or even “poor” to another. It is also true that an employee may succeed in one place and be ill adapted to meet the requirements of another. Again, it is a common complaint that the recommendation does not always carry with it implicit confidence in its contents. Daniel DeFoe wrote nearly two hundred years ago:

These words are as true a description of this phase of the subject in America to-day as they were in England at the beginning of the last century. It seems impossible to devise any system of personal recommendations that will convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The third expedient—the employment bureau—is apparently coming into general use, especially in the large cities where some means of communication is necessary between those desiring employees and employment. But it is in the large city, where the greatest need for it exists, that the employment bureau is most unsatisfactory. The bureau lives by the fees paid to it by those desiring help and those seeking employment. Every expedient, therefore, is used to extort fees from both classes, and it is difficult to tell which suffers more from this extortion. Even when numberless fees have been paid, the employer too often finds himself without the service to which his fee presumably entitles him. The first department abandoned by a large philanthropic institution in Boston, was the intelligence office, “because it was found impossible to supply well-trained servants while there was no demand for any other.”[230] But the greatest objection to the intelligence office is that it is often a breeding place for vice and crime. An investigation recently made of the intelligence offices in a large city showed that it supported one hundred and twenty, two thirds of them controlled by foreigners, many of them managed by minor ward politicians, and four of them under police supervision. The employees that can be found through such agencies are not those willingly received into a respectable family.[231] Employment bureaus in small cities are apparently more satisfactory than those in large ones, while those offices are to be commended which use printed forms for obtaining statements from previous employers as to the qualifications of applicants.[232] Those agencies patronized by an inferior class of employers and employees, especially those that are at no pains to secure recommendation of employees from respectable persons, are worse than useless.

Employers who adopt the fourth policy and advertise for help are forced to open an intelligence office on a small scale in their own homes.

All of these difficulties are so great, especially that of securing reliable testimony from responsible employers, that many persons tolerate incompetent service rather than incur the risk of a change for the worse.

A fifth difficulty encountered by the employers of domestic service, and probably the most serious of all, is the prevailing indifference among housekeepers to the action of economic law—a failure to realize that in domestic service, as in other occupations, the course followed by one employer has an appreciable effect on the condition of service as a whole. This can be best explained by a few concrete illustrations “drawn from life.”

Mr. A, an employer, leaves his city home during the summer, retaining in it two servants to care for the house and paying them their usual wages, $16 a month. No special service is required of them, but wages are paid in consideration of the tacit understanding that they are to remain in his employ. On the return of Mr. A, Mr. X, who has discharged his servants during the summer, offers the employees of Mr. A $18 a month. This price he can afford to pay since he has been at no expense for service during the summer. Mr. A, rather than lose his trusted employees, pays them the advance offered by Mr. X, although the services of neither employee are worth more than three months previous.

Mrs. B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee in view of the instruction she has received. Mrs. Y, who ignores Mrs. B socially and is indifferent to the matter of wages, calls on Mrs. B’s cook and offers her $5 per week. This is much above the current rate of wages in the place and moreover Mrs. B cannot afford to pay it. She therefore loses her trained cook.

Mr. C, an employer in haste to reach his distant home and anxious to secure a servant, engages in the afternoon a Swedish girl who has that morning landed in America and of whom he knows nothing. She is to accompany his family, which includes five children, to their Western home, have all of her expenses of travel paid by her employers, and receive $4.00 a week for her services as a nurse-maid.

Mrs. D, a housekeeper with a large family, moderate income, and ambitious tastes, employs one general servant and requires, in addition to the ordinary duties of such a servant, dining-room and chamber service.

Mrs. E, her nearest neighbor, a housekeeper with a small family, simple tastes, and free from numerous social demands, makes all of the desserts herself, requires no table service of her employee, and expects her daughter to assume the care of the chambers.

Mrs. F pays full wages to her inexperienced “help,” fifteen years old, because the latter has an invalid mother dependent on her.

Mr. G, with a family of two, prides himself on paying the highest wages in the place to his cook, second girl, and coachman.

Mrs. H, who has inherited a large family homestead, which she occupies with her sister, provides her three employees each with a separate bedroom, a special dining-room, a sitting-room well furnished, and grants many personal privileges, as the use of the horse and carriage for early church. She does not understand how any housekeeper can have trouble in securing and retaining competent employees. She often quotes to her nearest neighbor, “A good mistress makes a good servant,” her neighbor being obliged to use her back parlor with a mantel bed as a guest-room and therefore to limit somewhat the accommodations granted her employees.

Mrs. I gives each of her employees a key to the side door and makes no inquiries as to the hours they keep.

Mrs. J gives her servants her discarded evening dresses because “it keeps them in good humor.”

Mrs. K, the wife of a millionaire, “burns all of her old finery,” and makes it a special point to teach all of her twelve employees how to dress well and economically within the wages they receive.

Mrs. L does not permit her employee to wear frizzes or bangs, disapproves of her having company, and will not tolerate a young man caller under any circumstances.

Mrs. M, a lifelong invalid whose physician has prescribed absolute rest two hours every afternoon, reasons that her employee who rises two hours earlier than herself must need the same rest and therefore sends her every afternoon to take a nap. The latter thus never works afternoons and is able to attend more evening entertainments than other employees in the neighborhood.[233]

Mrs. N assists her husband in his business six hours each day and gives her employee full control of the house during her absence.

Mrs. O requires all her employees to perform their work according to minute directions laid down by herself and is constantly present to see that these are not deviated from in the slightest degree.

Mrs. P discharges her nursery maid for untruthfulness and gives her a recommendation testifying to her neatness, quickness, pleasant disposition, and fondness for children.

Mr. Q discharges his butler for incapacity, but in view of the fact that the latter has a widowed mother and an invalid sister dependent on him gives him an excellent recommendation.

Mr. R discharges his housekeeper “for infirmity of temper,” as he subsequently testifies in court, but gives her so excellent a recommendation that she believes she has been discharged for physical disability, and gives her testimony to this effect in the same lawsuit.

Mrs. S has a cook who drinks to excess one fourth of the time, but the latter has no fear of dismissal because three fourths of the time she cooks in a superior manner.

Mrs. T dislikes manual labor of every kind. Her servants therefore know that she will tolerate inefficient and incompetent service rather than be left for a single day without help.

Mr. U, the father of three young sons, has a coachman who swears like a trooper, but he retains him because Mrs. U considers him the most stylish coachman in the city.

Mrs. V applies to an employment bureau for a domestic and refuses six applicants because they are not “pretty” and “refined.” After finding one whose appearances are satisfactory, she parts with her because she is unwilling to black the gentlemen’s boots.

Mrs. W engages a woman to go out of town for service, the latter to wait a week before going and meantime to pay her own board. At the time agreed upon she reaches the employer’s house, to learn that the former “help” has decided to remain. She has thus lost a week’s board and wages and more than two dollars in going and returning to the city, and all of “her set” refuse to make engagements in the country.

The different economic, social, and moral questions connected with these various conditions, the illustrations of which could be multiplied indefinitely, may be, generally are, decided by each individual without reference to society at large. Wages are too often regulated by the employer’s bank account, hours of service by his caprice, and moral questions by his personal convenience. The employer is too often the autocrat in his own home. He considers that neither his neighbor nor the general public has any more concern in the business relations existing between himself and his domestic employees than it has in the price he pays for a dinner service or in the color and cut of his coat.

Yet domestic service is the only employment in which economic laws are so openly defied and all questions connected with it settled on the personal basis. No manufacturer can from charitable motives double the wages ordinarily paid to unskilled labor without being called to account for it by competing manufacturers, nor can he reduce unduly the wages of his employees without being held responsible for his course by the employees of other establishments, nor can he prolong by one fourth of an hour the daily period of labor without overstepping his legal privileges. Within certain narrow limits he has freedom, but competition, labor organizations, and the arm of the law combine to keep him within these limits. Before domestic service is freed from all the difficulties that attend it there must be a more widespread recognition of the responsibility of the individual employer to those outside his own household.[234]

Five general classes of perplexing conditions have been suggested. All of them are independent of the personal characteristics and habits of employer and employee and of the personal relationship that exists between them. They do not take into account the fact that throughout the South and wherever negroes are employed in the household the housekeeper must be ever on the alert to guard against dishonesty and immorality on the part of these employees, that intemperance has been found a besetting sin of cooks and coachmen irrespective of race and nationality, that many agree with Mr. Joseph Jefferson when he says, “I am satisfied that domestic melancholy sets in with the butler. He is the melodramatic villain of society.” They do not consider the tendencies encountered here as elsewhere towards indifference, idleness, laziness, low ideals and standards, insubordination, and a desire to obtain much for nothing.[235] They do not include lack of harmony in the personal relations between employees in the same household,[236] the constant friction that necessarily arises from the presence of a stranger in the family, the question of compatibility of disposition between the mistress and the maid, the feeling between employees and the children of the household. They are as prone to trouble a good mistress as a poor one, they are independent of knowledge of household affairs, of housekeeping experience, of good or ill treatment of employees, of any personal element whatever in employer or employee. They are difficulties apparently inherent in the present system of domestic service.

It is of interest to note the opinion of housekeepers on this point. The question, “Have you found it difficult to secure good domestic servants?” was answered with the following result:

Fifty-seven per cent therefore of the housekeepers represented by the schedules have found more or less difficulty in securing good servants. This is, probably, an underestimate of the true condition. Many housekeepers who see only the personal element involved in the employment of service consider an acknowledgment of difficulty a confession of weakness and inability on their own part to cope with the question and are therefore silent. Others have had the experience of one who writes, “I have had no difficulty, my cook having been with me eighteen years, and my second girl, her daughter, ten years. But if they should leave I should not know where to turn.” Again, the replies do not represent the experiences of a class not represented on the schedules—the many in the large cities who are able to employ servants only occasionally and find them through the lowest grade of intelligence offices.

These difficulties are certainly not decreasing,[237] and the demand for competent servants is in most places evidently greater than the supply.[238] These difficulties are, at times, somewhat modified by the conditions in which the employer is placed. They are apparently less in large cities that are ports of entry or the termini of leading railroad lines, and have comparatively few manufacturing industries in which women are employed; they are less in small families employing a large number of servants and paying high wages. But even all of these favorable conditions only modify—they do not change—the nature of the question.[239] A careful study of the returned schedules with reference to the location, population, and prevailing industry of the towns, the number of servants employed, size of family, and wages paid leads to this conclusion. Of the five hundred and forty-five employers who reported that they had difficulty in securing competent servants, only twenty-six gave in explanation a reason that would not have been applicable in any city, town, or village in the country, and those twenty-six had reference to the negroes at the South and the Chinese at the West. One half of the employees reporting state that they would go into another occupation provided it would pay them as well,[240] although the number is very small of those who are dissatisfied except with the disadvantages of the position. If these difficulties are found in every place irrespective of its size, its geographical location, its prevailing industry, the character of its inhabitants, and the personal relations of mistress and maid, something more is involved for the employer than “kind treatment” and personal consideration.

The belief has apparently been general that these perplexities are confined to our own country and that the adoption of English or German or French methods of dealing with the subject would remove them all. The question is undoubtedly a less difficult one in England than it is in this country, since it is not complicated by differences of race, religion, interests, and traditions, by foreign immigration, and possibly not by the same ease with which labor is transferred from one employment to another, while tradition and social custom have favored country rather than city life and have thus eliminated one of our difficulties. But with all these obstacles removed, DeFoe’s Behaviour of Servants shows that even in England the question is an old one, and current literature indicates that it is far from settled.[241]

If the question is asked in Germany, “Is it easy to secure good domestic servants here?” the almost invariable answer is, “It is very difficult, almost impossible.” The reasons for the difficulty are precisely the same as in America—the attractions of city life, the competition of shops and factories, the growth of democratic ideas, the difficulty of securing, in spite of the system of service books, unimpeachable recommendations, and the spirit of restlessness that everywhere prevails among the working classes. In some of the higher classes, where something of the old patriarchal relationship between mistress and maid still exists, there is apparently no difficulty; but each year these classes become more and more undermined by the social democratic spirit, and must in time be affected by the same conditions that bring perplexity to other classes. Yet it is true in Germany as in America that servants seeking places are always to be found, that intelligence offices are crowded with applicants for work, and that an army of incompetents is always at hand.

In France the problem is the same. It varies in details; the proportion of men employed in housework is far greater than in America, England, or Germany, servility of manner is not expected as in England, and waste of material is less common than in America. But fundamentally the conditions are the same as elsewhere.

The difficulties that meet the employer of domestic labor both in America and in Europe are the difficulties that arise from the attempt to harmonize an ancient, patriarchal industrial system with the conditions of modern life. Everywhere the employer closes his eyes to the incongruities of the attempt and lays the blame of failure, not to a defective system, but to the natural weaknesses in the character of the unfortunate persons obliged to carry it out. The difficulties in the path of both employer and employee will not only never be removed but will increase until the subject of domestic service is regarded as a part of the great labor question of the day and given the same serious consideration.

CHAPTER VII ADVANTAGES IN DOMESTIC SERVICE — TABLE XVII Vacation granted during the Year — TABLE XVIII Vacation granted with or without Loss of Wages

The question as to who constitute the class of domestic employees has been partially answered. One fourth are of foreign birth or belong to a different race from that of their employers, the majority are of foreign birth, of foreign parentage, or of a different race. Nearly one third of the number represented on the schedules have been engaged in other occupations besides domestic service—a fact indicating three things: first, the spirit of restlessness that characterizes the class, though not peculiar to it; second, the industrial independence of a considerable number of domestic employees, since they can at any time change not only employers but employment;[242] third, the fact that many do not enter domestic service with the thought of making it a permanent occupation.[243] About two thirds of those who have had other work report that they received higher wages in these occupations than in domestic service. In nearly every case, however, these represented the cash weekly or monthly wages received, not the yearly earnings, nor did they include the factor of personal expenses as in domestic service.

The reasons why women have entered domestic service are many and various. The following classification has been made of the reasons assigned by the employees returning the schedules:

These reasons and others demand a more detailed examination. It is true in domestic service, as in other occupations, that many drift into it because it is apparently the only course open to them, but there are certain advantages and disadvantages which a person who is free to choose always weighs before deciding for or against the occupation.

The most obvious advantage is that of high remuneration,[244] including not only wages and expenses, but as has been seen, the factors of steady employment, certainty of position, and the fact that no capital is required at any stage of the work or in preparation for it.

A second advantage is that the occupation is conducive to good health, including as it does regularity and variety of work, and involving no personal inconvenience or discomfort.[245] In one third of the families considered men servants are employed in some capacity, and this means that much of the hard work is done by them.

A third advantage is the fact that it gives at least the externals of a home. This consideration weighs especially with the foreign born and those who have no homes of their own.[246] How varied and numerous these home privileges are is best illustrated by the replies given by employers to the question, “Do you grant any special privileges?” Thirty answered “No,” and one hundred and seventy-five gave no answer. Eight hundred enumerated special privileges, and these formed sixty-eight different classes. The most important of these are single rooms, medical care and attendance when sick, use of daily papers, books, and magazines, evening instruction, sitting-room for visitors, no restrictions as to visitors, use of bath-room and sewing-machine, use of horse and carriage when distant from church, seat at table except when guests are present, seat in church, and concert and theatre tickets (in the families of newspaper reporters). Many other privileges are mentioned,—these are the most frequently granted. Seventy per cent of the employers state that they give a single room, but about one half of this number employ only one domestic. In many cases a large room is given for every two domestics, with separate furniture for each. One hundred and forty-six specify the use of the dining-room, and ninety-four families give the use of a special sitting-room. All of these privileges show that even if the employee is not a member of the family, her life is as much a part of it, with the single exception of a seat at the family table, as is that of the average boarder.

This enumeration of privileges does not include two other classes which have in a sense ceased to be regarded as such, but rather as prerogatives of the position. These are freedom from work at specified times each week and a stated vacation during the year with or without wages.

The matter of free hours at stated times each week is apparently a simple one—there is at first thought more uniformity here among housekeepers than in regard to any other thing; but while only three per cent of the employers do not give some specified time during the week, there are one hundred and twenty-three classes of combinations which housekeepers have found it possible to make out of the seven afternoons and seven evenings of the week, thus apparently disproving the common belief that the custom is universal of granting Thursday afternoon and Sunday evening. In sixty-eight of these classes one or more afternoons are included and in fifteen others some portion of Sunday. In the case of more than one thousand employees at least one afternoon each week is given, while more than four hundred employers give a part of Sunday.[247]

The question in regard to vacation granted during the year was answered with reference to nearly a thousand employees, and in only one case was a vacation not given, the time varying from the legal holidays, which perhaps can hardly be called a vacation, to three months. Sixty-five per cent of employers give a vacation of from one week to three months, twenty per cent one or two weeks, fifteen per cent less than a week, and twenty per cent give a vacation but do not specify the length of time. These facts apply to women employees. In the case of men the conditions are not materially different, the facts given indicating apparently a smaller per cent among women receiving a vacation of more than two weeks and a larger per cent receiving less than a week. In the great majority of cases this vacation is given without loss of wages. Tables XVII and XVIII illustrate these facts.

A short vacation granted during the year without loss of wages has in many localities come to be regarded by employees as one of the prerogatives of the occupation, and not, as formerly, a special privilege given. All things considered, it is a matter of surprise that so much rather than that so little time is given. In other occupations a vacation can be granted employees during a dull season without loss to the employer. But the household machinery cannot stop action without disaster. A vacation given household employees means that the employer must perform a double amount of domestic work, or provide for special assistance—often a difficult and even impossible task.

A fourth advantage that domestic service has as an occupation is the knowledge it gives of household affairs and the training in them—knowledge of which every woman, whatever her station in life and whether married or unmarried, has at times most pressing need.[248]

A fifth consideration is that it offers congenial employment to many whose tastes lie specially in this direction.[249] It is undoubtedly true that many persons in other occupations would honestly prefer housework if some of its present disadvantages could be eliminated.[250]

Still another advantage is the legal protection offered domestic employees, although as Mr. James Schouler well says, the relation of master and servant is in theory hostile to the genius of free institutions, since it bears the marks of social caste. “It may be pronounced as a relation of more general importance in ancient than in modern times and better applicable at this day to English than to American society.”[251] But technically, the relation according to Chancellor Kent is a legal status resting entirely on contract. One agrees to work and the other to pay, but both are on an equality as far as rights are concerned.[252] The legal rights accorded a servant are freedom from physical punishment,[253] proper food and support in illness or disability during the time of employment,[254] the right to the enjoyment of a good character—provided she has one—and the law presumes she has it until the contrary appears,[255] wages, if the servant has performed his part of the contract,[256] and damages in case of discharge before the expiration of the contract.[257]

These advantages which domestic service as an occupation has over most other employments are patent. They would be recognized by all, whether domestic employees or not, as the accompaniments of the service as it exists under reasonably favorable conditions. They are advantages which, with the exception of the home privileges, are independent of the personal character and disposition of employers. They are apparently inherent in the occupation, as much to be expected as are free Sundays and evenings after six o’clock in mills and factories. They are the inducements which, when a choice has been possible, have led intelligent women to become household employees. They are the advantages that have been repeatedly set forth by the press and the pulpit to sewing-women and shop-girls working at the starvation limit of wages in large cities to induce them to better their condition. Unquestionably many such women would be far better off than they are now if they were in comfortable domestic service. It has been said by the head of one of our great labor bureaus that all questions concerning wage-earning women resolve themselves into those of “wages, hours, health, and morals,” and domestic service conforms to all the requirements that could be demanded under these four heads, with the possible exception of hours under unfavorable conditions. But, notwithstanding these advantages, women in cities still prefer sewing, country girls drift into mills and factories, teachers’ agencies are crowded with applicants who can never secure a position and could not fill one if obtained; there must be something else involved in the question besides the matter of “wages, hours, health, and morals.”

CHAPTER VIII THE INDUSTRIAL DISADVANTAGES OF DOMESTIC SERVICE — TABLE XIX Actual Daily Working Hours

No one occupation includes every advantage and no disadvantages. There must always be a balancing of the pros and cons, and domestic service has its industrial disadvantages, which are as patent as its advantages, and like them are independent of the personal relationship existing between the employer and the employee.

The question was asked of employees, “What reasons can you give why more women do not choose housework as a regular employment?” The reasons assigned may be classified as follows:

Some of these and other reasons demand a more detailed explanation.

The first industrial disadvantage is the fact that there is little or no opportunity for promotion in the service nor are there opening out from it kindred occupations. An ambitious and capable seamstress becomes a dressmaker and mistress of a shop, a successful clerk sets up a small fancy store, the trained nurse by further study develops into a physician, the teacher becomes the head of a school; but there are no similar openings in household employments. Success means a slight increase in wages, possibly an easier place, or service in a more aristocratic neighborhood, but the differences are only slight ones of degree, never those of kind. “Once a cook, always a cook” may be applied in principle to every branch of the service. The only place where promotion is in any way possible is in hotel service.[258] Those women who would become the most efficient domestics are the ones who see most clearly this drawback to the occupation.[259]

The second disadvantage is the paradoxical one that it is possible for a capable woman to reach in this employment comparative perfection in a reasonably short time. Table service is a fine art which many waitresses never learn, but it is easily mastered by one who “mixes it with brains.” One illustration of this is the superior service given at summer resorts by college students without special training. The proper care of a room is understood by few maids, but the comprehension of a few simple principles enables an intelligent woman soon to become an expert. The work of a cook involves much more, but because many persons cook for years without learning how to provide a single palatable and nourishing dish, it does not follow that the art cannot be readily acquired. This fact taken in connection with the previous one unconsciously operates to prevent a large number of ambitious women from becoming domestics.

A third disadvantage is the fact that “housework is never done.” In no other occupation involving the same amount of intelligent work do the results seem so literally ephemeral. This indeed is not the true statement of the case—mistresses are learning slowly that cooking is a moral and scientific question, that neatness in caring for a room is a matter of hygiene, and that table service has æsthetic possibilities. But if it has taken long for the most intelligent part of society to understand that the results of housework are not transient, but as far-reaching in their effects as are the products of any other form of labor, it cannot be deemed strange that domestics as a class and those in other occupations complain “in housework there’s nothing to show for your work.”

A fourth disadvantage is the lack of organization in domestic work. The verdict from the standpoint of the statistician has been quoted.[260] A domestic employee sums up the question from her point of view when she says, “Most women like to follow one particular branch of industry, such as cooking, or chamber work, or laundry work, because it enables one to be thorough and experienced; but when these are combined, as a general thing the work is hard and never done.”

A fifth disadvantage is the irregularity of working hours. This is a most serious one, since the question is complicated not only by the irregularity that exists in every family, but also by the varying customs in different families. The actual working hours of a general servant may vary from one instance of five hours in Kansas to another of eighteen hours in Georgia. They sometimes vary in the same city from seven to seventeen hours. It is a difficult matter to ascertain with the utmost definiteness, but a careful examination of all statements made seems to show that the actual working hours are ten in the case of thirty-eight per cent of women employees, thirty-seven per cent averaging more than ten hours, and twenty-five per cent less than this. The working hours for men average somewhat longer than the hours for women, while there are slight differences in the various classes of servants; but they are of too indefinite a character to be specially noted. Table XIX will illustrate these points.

Many of these differences are inherent in the composition of the family, and can never be removed; many of them are accidental and their number could be lessened were employers so inclined; many of them grow out of necessarily differing standards of living. This is seen where one family of ten employs one general servant and another family of ten employs eleven servants; one family of four employs nine servants, while seventy-eight other families of the same size each employ only one servant; one family of eight has sixteen servants, while each one of eight other families consisting of eight persons employs one servant; twenty-three families numbering seven each have one general servant, while another family of seven has thirteen employees; in another instance, three employees serve a family of one. These contrasts could be multiplied indefinitely. They simply indicate in one way the hopeless confusion that must exist at present in the matter of hours of service required. The irregularities in even a well-regulated family are always great. Many of these are apparently necessary, and the employee must expect to meet them—they are often not so great as those that perplex the mistress of the house in her share of the household duties, but the fact cannot be ignored that they exist and have weight. The one afternoon each week with generally one or more evenings after work is done is not sufficient compensation.[261] It is the irregularity in the distribution of working time rather than the amount of time demanded that causes dissatisfaction on the part of employees. No complaint is more often made than this, and the results of the investigation seem to justify the complaint. To a young woman therefore seeking employment the question of working hours assumes the aspect of a lottery—she may draw a prize of seven working hours or she may draw a blank of fourteen working hours; she cannot be blamed for making definite inquiries of a prospective employer regarding the size of the family and the number of other servants employed.

A sixth disadvantage closely connected with the preceding is the matter of free time evenings and Sundays. This objection to housework is frequently made;[262] it is one that can never be wholly obviated, since the household machinery cannot stop at six o’clock and must be kept in order seven days in the week, but were society so inclined the objection could be lessened.

A seventh difficulty is presented to the American born girl when she realizes that she must come into competition with the foreign born and colored element.[263] Although much of this feeling is undoubtedly unreasonable, it is not peculiar to domestic service. The fact must be accepted, with or without excuse for it.

Another disadvantage that weighs with many is the feeling that in other occupations there is more personal independence. This includes not only the matter of time evenings and Sundays, which they can seldom call unconditionally their own, but there is a dislike of interference on the part of the employer, either with their work or with their personal habits and tastes. This interference is often hard to bear when the employer is an experienced housekeeper—it is intolerable in the case of an inexperienced one. The “boss” carpenter who himself knew nothing about the carpenter’s trade would soon have all his workmen arrayed against him; in every occupation an employee is unwilling to be directed except by his superior in knowledge and ability.[264] It seems unreasonable to expect domestic service to be an exception to this universal rule. But even experienced housekeepers often do not realize how difficult it is for one person to work in the harness of another, and by insisting on having work done in their own way, even by competent servants, they sometimes unconsciously hinder the accomplishment of their own ends.[265] There is also connected with this the preference for serving a company or a corporation rather than a private individual. It is hard to explain this feeling except on general grounds of prejudice, but the belief undoubtedly exists that there is more personal independence connected with work in a large establishment than there in serving an individual. There is often a similar feeling of independence in working in families employing a large number of servants, or in those occupying a high station in life.[266]

The industrial disadvantages of the occupation are best summed up by a young factory operative who was for a time in domestic service. In answer to the question, “Why do girls dislike domestic service?” she writes:

The industrial disadvantages of the occupation certainly are many, including as they do the lack of all opportunity for promotion, the great amount of mere mechanical repetition involved, the lack of organization in the service, irregularity in working hours, the limitation of free time evenings and Sundays, competition with the foreign born and the negro element that seems objectionable to the American born, and the interference with work often by those less skilled than the workers themselves. The industrial disadvantages, however, form but one class of the two that weigh most seriously against the occupation. The social disadvantages will be discussed in the following chapter.

CHAPTER IX THE SOCIAL DISADVANTAGES OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

The most serious disadvantage in domestic service that remains to be considered is the low social position the employment entails at the present time on those who enter it. This shows itself in various ways. The most noticeable is the lack of home privileges. It is true that the domestic employee receives board, lodging, protection, and many incidental privileges in the home of her employer; that these are as a rule better than she could provide for herself elsewhere, and much superior to those which can be secured by women working in shops and factories. But board and lodging do not constitute a home, and the domestic can never be a part of the family whose external life she shares. The case is well stated by an employee who writes:

This appreciation of the difference between being in a family and being a part of it is in direct ratio to the delicacy and sensitiveness of the organization of the employee. An American who can be considered one of the family is the very one who most appreciates the difference between being one of the family and like one of the family. The differences which are most keenly felt are three. The first is the fact that a certain amount of regulation must always be exercised by the employer in regard to the number and character of visitors received by the employee. It is a matter of self-protection, and is sometimes due to the employee as well. It often does not differ in kind or in degree from the care exercised for the other members of the household. The necessity for it is recognized by the better class of employees.[267] Nevertheless the restraint is irksome, the desire for independence not always unreasonable, and the wish for a place in which to receive visitors not surprising.

Another deprivation is the lack of opportunity for receiving or showing in even a slight degree that hospitality which can be accepted and exercised in every other employment involving equal intelligence.[268] The domestic employee can neither accept nor give an invitation to supper; she cannot offer a cup of tea to a caller; she does not ask a friend to remain to dinner, except perhaps at rare intervals a mother or a sister. She has the privilege of using without limit for her own necessities the food purchased by her employer, but she cannot share it without transgressing this privilege. She cannot invite her friends for an afternoon tea to meet a friend from another place, or give a small dinner party or a chafing-dish supper. She can do none of these things the desire for which is so natural and which can be gratified in a small way in almost every other occupation. Even more than this, she is never a sharer in the general social life of the community.[269] She is precluded not by her character but by her condition from exercising those social privileges which are instinctive in all persons.

Another social barrier is the failure of society to recognize the need on the part of the employee of those opportunities for personal improvement so freely accorded to those in other occupations. If she has a taste for music or art she can cultivate it only at the expense of ridicule,[270] while her need of intellectual advantages in a similar way meets with no recognition.[271] If she is refined and cultivated, she must often associate with those who are coarse and ignorant.[272]

But the question of social standing goes farther than this. Not only are social advantages of every kind denied the domestic employee, but the badge of social inferiority is put upon her in characters as unchangeable as are the spots of a leopard. This badge assumes several different forms. The first is the use of the word “servant.”[273] We may prove from etymology that every person who confers a favor on another is his servant. We may present a lawyer’s brief showing to the satisfaction of every local and national court that every employee in the eye of the law is a servant. We may argue from the biblical standpoint and show without a flaw in our chain of reasoning that we are all servants of one another. We may point to the classification of occupations made by the national census bureau and show that clergymen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and domestic servants are placed together. We may quote to every employee the proudly humble motto of the Prince of Wales, “Ich dien,” and the example of the Pope, who calls himself “the servant of the servants of the Lord.” We may by a social fiction subscribe ourselves a score of times each day, “Your most humble and obedient servant.” We may do all of these things, but just as long as common phraseology restricts the ordinary use of the word to those persons engaged in domestic employments for which they receive a fixed compensation, just so long will arguments prove of no avail and the word “servant” continue to be a mark of social degradation. The efforts of domestic employees to substitute the terms “maid” or “working housekeeper” have as yet in many quarters excited little more than ridicule.

A second mark of social inferiority is the use of the Christian name in address. It may seem a very trifling matter, yet the fact again remains that domestic employees are the only class of workers, except day laborers, who are thus addressed. The weight that is attached to the matter in other walks of life is seen in the policy of more than one well-known newspaper; a strong weapon of attack in encounter with opponents has been the reference by Christian name to those whom the writers wish to consign to political obscurity. In no way does advancement in age and dignity show itself sooner than in the substitution of the surname for the Christian name. The boy shows his sense of growing importance by dropping the Christian name in addressing his companions. In the eyes of the débutante the first card bearing the name “Miss Brown” throws into insignificance many other advantages of the new position. Probably few persons would choose to go through life addressed by even their most intimate friends, aside from kith and kin, as are the class of domestic employees. The use of the Christian name in address undoubtedly grew out of the close family relationship that existed between the employer and the employee, but it has become a badge of social inferiority since it is used alike by strangers and friends. Any person considers himself privileged to use the familiar address towards any employee simply by virtue of the employee’s position. Even more objectionable is the English custom, sometimes affected in America, of dropping the Christian name and using the surname without a title, since it implies social inferiority even more than the familiar address.[274]

A third badge of the position sometimes insisted on is the cap and apron. These are not worn, as are the cap and sleeves of the trained nurse, to indicate the completion of a regular course of scientific training; they are not the uniform of the postman or the policeman, which shows the recognition by national or municipal authorities of superior fitness for the position filled and carries with it somewhat of the prestige of the power the wearer serves; they represent necessarily no attainment on the part of the person wearing them, nor are they, as worn, always the object of laudable ambition. The cap and apron sometimes indicate the rise of the employer in the social scale rather than the professional advance of the employee. The wider the separation in any community between employer and employee, the greater is the tendency to insist on the cap and apron. The same principle is involved when coachmen are not permitted to wear beards and hotel and club waiters are required to sacrifice the moustache.

A fourth badge is the fact that domestic servants are made not only to feel but to acknowledge their social inferiority. Not only deference but even servility of manner is demanded as of no other class, and this in an age when social and family relationships are everywhere becoming more democratic, when reverence and respect for authority are sometimes considered old-fashioned virtues, when even undue freedom of speech and manner are permitted to other classes. The domestic employee receives and gives no word or look of recognition on the street except in meeting those of her own class; she is seldom introduced to the guests of the house, whom she may faithfully serve during a prolonged visit; the common daily courtesies exchanged between the members of the household are not always shown her; she takes no part in the general conversation around her; she speaks only when addressed, obeys without murmur orders which her judgment tells her are absurd, “is not expected to smile under any circumstances,” and ministers without protest to the whims and obeys implicitly the commands of children from whom deference to parents is never expected.

A fifth mark of social inferiority is the fact that domestic employees, especially those connected with boarding houses, restaurants, and hotels, are generally given a fee for every service rendered.

A self-respecting man or woman in any other occupation is insulted by the offer of a fee. The person who through mistake offers a fee to a person belonging to his own station brings upon himself only ridicule and embarrassment. The shop-girl who works for $7 a week spends half an hour in a vain attempt to match for a customer a bit of ribbon; but she would be justly indignant, as would be her employer, if she were offered a fee. In hotels and restaurants, the larger the establishment and the more the price of every article should warrant exemption from such outside dues, the greater is felt to be the pressure for their payment. Nowhere else is the democratic principle “first come first served” so flagrantly violated, and nowhere else would its violation be tolerated. Feeing is a system of begging that cannot be reached by charity organization societies, a species of blackmail levied on all who wish good service, for which there is no legal redress, a European and American form of backsheesh that carries with it the taint of the soil from which it has sprung. It has its origin in snobbishness and it results in toadyism and flunkeyism. It is objectionable because it makes the giver feel as humiliated in giving as the recipient ought to feel in receiving. It puts a price on that kindness and consideration which ought to be the “royal bounty” in connection with every paid service, it destroys genuine sympathy and unselfishness, it creates an eye service and introduces into every branch of domestic service an element of demoralization and degradation that is incalculable. It takes from the person receiving it the option of placing a value on the service rendered by him, and it is the only occupation where fees are given that does not carry with it this privilege. A lawyer or a physician must be the best judge of the value of his services, but the domestic servant takes “what you please.”

One of the results of the system is indicated by a jesting paragraph that recently went the rounds of the daily press to the effect that the porter of the Grand Pacific Hotel, in Chicago, had retired with a fortune of $100,000 accumulated from tips given him by guests of the house,[275] while the men who contributed it were still struggling to keep the wolf from the door. In tipping, as in bribery, the social odium falls on the one who takes the tip or the bribe, not on the one who offers it. The fortune of $100,000, more or less, would not give social position to one who had acquired it through fees. But the fee is at bottom a bribe offered for service for which payment is presumably made by the employer; it is a bribe because it is an additional sum offered for quick service or good service which a waiter will not give without this extra compensation from the person served. As long as this form of bribery prevails, every person who accepts the bribe is socially tainted and no amount of financial success resulting from it can eradicate the taint.

Not only is the fee objectionable in itself, but the manner of giving it is equally so. It is bestowed surreptitiously, as if the giver appreciated the fact that he was doing an insulting thing and was ashamed of it; or it is offered openly with the patronizing manner of one who says, “I have no use for such a trifle; take it, if you wish it.” It is folded in a napkin, tucked under a plate, slipped into the hand of a waiter with a vain attempt to appear unconscious, left ostentatiously on a tray, or contemptuously flung at an attendant. It can be neither given nor received with the self-respect that accompanies any reputable business transaction.

Two excuses for feeing are given. One, “because every one else does it and one feels contemptible if he doesn’t do it,” an easy, good-natured way of disposing of a serious problem. Comparatively few persons are controlled by general principles; each acts according to what seems most convenient at the time being. The second excuse is that employees in hotels and restaurants and porters in drawing-room and sleeping cars are underpaid. This is undoubtedly true, and it will remain true as long as the general public frees the class of hotel, restaurant, and boarding-house proprietors, and palace and sleeping car companies, from the responsibility of paying their own assistants. But the general public also knows that the saleswomen in many large stores work for almost nothing, that street-car conductors and motor men are overworked and underpaid, that school teachers receive but a pittance. The public, however, pursues here a different policy; it puts on “the white list” employers who pay their saleswomen well, it allows street-railway employees to fight out the matter of low wages by strikes or in such other ways as they deem fit, it permits the school teacher to struggle on with a salary of $400 or $500 a year and patronizes a fair held for the benefit of a pension fund. It is difficult to see why this reason for feeing a domestic employee should not hold good in all underpaid employments; that it does not is one reason why those in other occupations do not fall in the social scale. That the public continues to pay directly the employees in this occupation as it does in no other is one explanation of the ill repute it bears among self-respecting wage-earning men and women. Every person has a contempt for another who accepts a fee, and the reproach extends from the individual to every branch of the occupation he represents. No other thing has done more to lower domestic service in the eyes of the public than this most pernicious custom, and every person who fees a domestic employee has by that act done something to degrade what should be an honorable occupation into a menial service.[276]

Another phase of the social question is presented by an employer who writes, “There is something wrong when a young girl servant is sent out in the evening to accompany the daughter or perhaps the mistress and return alone.” If protection is the thought, the maid needs it as much as the mistress; if it is in deference to a social custom, the maid must bitterly resent any custom which demands this distinction between herself and those whom she serves. Another aspect of the same question is suggested when it is realized what veritable dens of iniquity are some of the intelligence offices in large cities, and how difficult it often is for a domestic employee to come in contact with them without becoming contaminated by the touch. These are the things that lead many to believe that “the kitchen has become very like a social Botany Bay.”[277]

It is this social position with its accompanying marks of social inferiority that, more than any other one thing, turns the scale against domestic service as an occupation in the thoughts of many intelligent and ambitious women whose tastes naturally incline them to domestic employments. Professor Arthur T. Hadley has well said in a discussion of comparative wages, “One thing which counts for more and costs more than anything else is social standing.”[278] The social standing maintained by a cash girl on $3 a week which she fears to lose by going into domestic service ought not to be vastly superior to what is within the reach of intelligent cooks earning $10 a week; yet undoubtedly it is; and while this is true the number of intelligent women in domestic service will not increase.[279]

Other objections to domestic service in addition to those enumerated are sometimes made. Some of them arise from misconceptions,[280] others are trivial and do not demand consideration, while others are individual rather than general. These are the disadvantages that tell most strongly against the occupation. They do not include the element of ill-treatment by mistresses or their lack of consideration; or the fact that there is sometimes much in the tone and manner of an employer that is most irritating to a self-respecting person; or that there are occasionally employers who feel that they rise in the social scale in the same proportion that they make employees sensible of inferiority or dependence; or that many mistresses demand more than can be performed; or that some employers are unreasonable, others disagreeable, and still others petulant and fault-finding; or that some “expect perfection at twelve dollars a month and positive genius at thirteen.” These conditions are found, but they are not peculiar to domestic service; the disadvantages discussed are all independent of good or bad personal treatment, they may be modified by the character of the family to whom the service is rendered, but they cannot be removed by any individual employer acting alone, however much he has at heart the interests of his own employee or of domestic employees as a class.

In comparing the advantages and disadvantages of domestic service as an occupation it will be obvious that the advantages are numerous, substantial, and easily recognized; the disadvantages are many, but they are far more subtile, intangible, and far reaching. The advantages are those which the economic woman always sees and which take her from unhealthy tenement houses into country air and sunshine; from overcrowded occupations into one where the demand for workers is and always must be unlimited; from starvation wages to peace and plenty; from long hours of dreary mechanical toil to intelligent work; from failure in an uncongenial occupation to success and prosperity in this; from a life whose sufferings and privations, as yet but half told, have roused the sympathies of all social reformers, to a life of freedom from the sweater, the floor-walker, the officious and vulgar superintendent, the industrial Shylocks of every occupation, to a life of comparative ease and comfort. But while the economic woman, like the economic man, always sees these things, the actual woman looks at another side. She does not understand why work that society calls the most honorable a woman can do when done in her own home without remuneration, becomes demeaning when done in the house of another for a fixed compensation, but she recognizes the fact; she sees that discredit comes not from the work itself but from the conditions under which it is performed, and she does not willingly place herself in these conditions; she sees that a class line is always drawn as in no other occupation; she is willing and glad to pay her life for what seems to her life—excitement, city ways, society of home friends, personal independence which another might call slavery. She does not care for those advantages which another person points out; to her they count as nothing in comparison with the price she must pay for them. Of five hundred and forty employees of whom the question was asked, “Would you give up housework if you could find another occupation that would pay you as well?” one-half answered, “Yes.” Yet the number is very small of those who complain of ill-treatment or lack of consideration on the part of the employer. There is, indeed, often much ground for complaint on this score, but it must be seen that other relationships besides the personal ones are entered into when the relation of employer and employee is established. That which decides the question is not always the economic advantage, not always the personal treatment, but that subtile thing the woman calls life. “Wages, hours, health, and morals” may all weigh in the scale in favor of domestic service, but life outweighs them all. The advantages are such as lead many people to urge domestic service for the daughters of others, the disadvantages are such as incline them to choose any occupation but this for their own daughters.[281]

CHAPTER X DOUBTFUL REMEDIES

The difficulties attending domestic service are so many and so pressing that a large number of measures intended to meet them have been proposed, all of them as varied as the personalities of those dealing with the problem. This difference of opinion in regard to the best methods of meeting the question is largely due to the fact that, not domestic service as an occupation, but domestic servants as individuals have been considered. It has also come from the fact that while the feudal castle of the Middle Ages has shrunk to the city apartment, the attempt is made to preserve intact the customs that had their origin in mediævalism and ought to have died with it, overlooking the fact that every other occupation has made at least some slight concession to economic progress. Moreover, it must be said that the purely ethical phases of the subject have been the ones most often kept in mind in discussing measures of relief. This ethical side of the question is indeed important, but it is largely based on the assumption that the relation between employer and employee is a purely personal one. Since the discussion of the question up to this point has been based on a different theory, namely, that other relations besides the personal ones are established when that of employer and employee is assumed, and that domestic service has been and is affected by political, economic, industrial, social, and educational questions, the present discussion of possible and impossible remedies in domestic service cannot take into consideration the purely ethical questions involved in the subject, but must deal with its other aspects.

Before attempting to answer the question of what can and what cannot be done, a few general principles deduced from the consideration of the subject up to this point must be indicated. First, since the evils are many and complicated no panacea can be found. The patent medicine that cures every physical ailment from consumption to chilblains is disappearing before the scientific studies of the day; it is quite as little to be recommended for economic and social maladies. Second, the remedy applied must have some relation to the nature of the disease. A sprained wrist will not yield to the treatment for dyspepsia, nor can rheumatism and deafness be cured by the same brown pills. The principle does not differ if moral remedies are administered for educational diseases and economic maladies are expected to succumb to social tonics. Third, reform in domestic service must be accomplished along the same general economic lines as are reforms in other great departments of labor—not at right angles to general industrial progress. Fourth, reform in domestic service must be the result of evolution from present conditions and tendencies—not a special creation. Fifth, no reform can be instituted which will remove to-morrow all difficulties that exist to-day. Domestic service cannot reach at a bound the goal towards which other forms of labor have been moving with halting steps.

These principles are simple and will perhaps be generally accepted. A few of the measures often suggested as affording means of relief may be tested by them.

It is the opinion of a very large class that all difficulties can be removed by the application of the golden rule. No belief is more widespread than this. But it rests wholly on the assumption that the relation between employer and employee is a personal one, and presupposes that if this personal relationship could be made an ideal one the question would settle itself. In so far as the connection between mistress and maid is a personal one, the golden rule is sufficient, but other factors are involved in the problem. The golden rule may be ever so perfectly observed, but that fact does not eliminate the competition of other industries where the golden rule may be observed with equal conscientiousness, nor does it remove the distasteful competition of American born employees with foreigners and negroes; it does not overcome the preference for city life or the love of personal independence; it is not always able to substitute intelligence, capability, interest, and economy for ignorance, inefficiency, indifference, and waste; the observance of the golden rule by the employer is not a guarantee that it will always be followed by the employee. For moral difficulties, moral remedies must be applied, but they will not always operate where the maladies are in their nature economic, social, and educational. The golden rule is a poultice that will relieve an inflammation but will not remove the cause of the evil—a tonic that will invigorate the system but which cannot be substituted for surgical treatment.

Another class of persons believes that the application of intelligence as well as of ethical principles is what is required of the employer. This position is best expressed by the correspondent of a leading journal who says: “The capable housekeeper is quite satisfied with the performance of her own domestic duties. If a true woman performs her whole duty, that which lies within her sphere of action, this everlasting cry of reform in domestic service would cease and in its place there would rise a more satisfied race of human beings.” But intelligence, capability, and the observance of all ethical principles must, like the golden rule, encounter the question of free Sundays and evenings after six o’clock, as well as that of the regularity of working hours and the possibility of promotion found in other occupations. No system ever has been or ever can be found that will enable a housekeeper to conduct a household satisfactorily on the instinct or the inspiration theory, to substitute sentiment for educated intelligence and for a knowledge of economic conditions outside of the individual home. The ostrich is said to cover its head in the sand and imagine that it is safe from capture; as well may the individual employer say, “I have settled the question for myself; it is sufficient and I am satisfied.”

A third suggestion in harmony with the two preceding is to receive the employee into the family of the employer, giving her all of the family privileges, including a seat at the table. This plan finds many advocates among intelligent, conscientious employers who are earnestly trying to find a way out of present troubles. But there are several objections to it. One is the fact that such a policy is a distinct deviation from all economic tendencies of the century. A hundred years ago under the domestic system of manufactures the masterworkman received his apprentices into his family, and no other arrangement seemed possible. The factory system has revolutionized this manner of life, and a return to it in manufacturing industries would be as impossible as a restoration of the feudal system itself. The attempt to return to what was once a common custom in many parts of the North is an attempt to restore the patriarchal relationship between employer and employee in a generation which looks with disfavor on paternalism in other forms of labor. Another objection to the plan is its inherent impossibility. John Stuart Mill could conceive of another world where two and two do not make four, but it must in this world be at present an impossibility to conceive of a family in which the idea of unity is not an essential feature. The very foundation of a family is its integrity. Four plus one half can never equal five, and no one can ever be more than a fraction in any family into which he has not been born, married, or legally adopted. The family circle cannot be squared, and if it could be, the curve of beauty would be lost. Moreover, even if the plan could be carried out, it would not meet the needs of the majority of employees or of those who would become such if the conditions of service were more favorable. What domestics as a class desire is the opportunity of living their own lives in their own way. This is what other occupations offer to a greater degree than does domestic service, and it is one reason for the preference for them. The desire is not always on the part of the employees for the same friends, the same amusements, the same privileges, the same opportunities, the same interests, as those of their employers, but it is to have such friends, such amusements, such privileges, such opportunities, such interests, as they personally crave. Even what would be in themselves the greatest advantages often cease to be such when the element of personal choice in regard to them is removed. Still another objection is the failure of the plan to subserve the best interests of the employer, even granting that it is best for the employee. It grows out of the nature of the family, as previously suggested. Comparatively few persons are willing, except as a business necessity, to open their homes even temporarily to those compelled to board. The privacy of home life is destroyed to even a greater extent by the attempt to make household employees permanently a part of it, not because those admitted within the family circle are of this particular class, but because they are not of the family. Marriage has been called a process of naturalization—a difficult one when all the conditions are most favorable. The process is infinitely more difficult when an extraneous element is introduced into a family, not as a result of mutual choice, but of a business agreement.

A fourth proposition for lessening the difficulties in domestic service is to increase the number of employees by bringing to the North negroes from the South. So seriously has this plan been contemplated that companies have in some places already been formed, and through them colored servants have been sent to different parts of the Eastern states. But this plan assumes that no perplexities exist where colored servants are found, and also that there are no difficulties which a greater supply of domestic employees will not remove. That the former assumption cannot rightly be made is evident from many facts. The anomalous condition is found in at least one Southern city of an organization to assist Northern housekeepers to secure colored servants, and of another to aid Southern housekeepers in obtaining white employees from the North.[282] The examination of a large number of advertisements for “help wanted” shows apparently a preference in many parts of the South for white servants,[283] while the testimony of many employers seems to show that service is at present in a transitional state—the older generation is disappearing, while in the younger generation the same tendencies are found as in other classes of employees.[284] The second assumption, that the question is settled wherever the supply is greater than the demand, also seems unwarranted in the judgment of many.[285] These facts are in no sense to be regarded as an exhaustive presentation of the condition of domestic service at the South; they only indicate that in the opinion of many intelligent employers “the question of negro help is as broad as the negro question itself.” If it has proved such to those who know the negro best, there is little hope that Northern employers would gain more than new and perplexing complications by introducing as domestic servants large numbers of negroes from the South.[286]

Another suggestion of the same character is the importation of Chinese servants. While much has been said of the superiority of the Chinese as household employees,[287] and not a few housekeepers would be glad to see the restriction act repealed,[288] difficulties other than the present legislative and political ones stand in the way of adopting this policy. The Chinese, as well as the negroes, occupy in this country a social position inferior to that of Americans or Europeans. Gresham’s law may perhaps be applied to domestic service and the principle stated that superior and inferior labor cannot exist side by side—the inferior must drive out the superior. Unless employees of the lower social grade can be imported in such numbers as to meet every call for domestic servants, there must exist, as now, the discrepancy between supply and demand. The old struggle between free labor and slave labor must be repeated in miniature wherever the social chasm exists between two classes of laborers. The introduction to any considerable extent of Chinese servants would drive out European labor as that has in a measure driven out native born American service.

As a means of promoting a better adjustment of the business relations between employer and employee, it is sometimes proposed that licenses should be granted domestic employees by municipal corporations. This plan, however, would be a violation of the principles underlying the granting of such licenses. A municipal body is not justified in granting a license to any employment or industry unless such occupation is objectionable in itself as entailing expense, or danger of expense on the part of the taxpayers, as the sale of intoxicating liquors; or unless it involves special use by non-taxpayers of city improvements made at the expense of the taxpayers, as in the case of cabmen; or unless it brings into competition with tax-paying industries trades which contribute nothing to the general treasury, as is true of travelling peddlers; or unless it brings special danger, as of fire in the case of theatrical companies. The license is a tax imposed in return for special risks incurred or privileges granted. Domestic service comes under none of these principles, and to place it under the care of municipal authorities as is not done with other occupations of its class would be to degrade it in an unjustifiable way. The license, when granted in accordance with a principle, is not more objectionable than an ordinary tax; if granted without principle, it becomes an obnoxious and tyrannical measure.

The system of German service books has been widely advocated as an efficient means of securing reliable testimony as to the character and capabilities of employees, thus removing one of the most serious of present difficulties. But even in Germany, where obedience is man’s first law, as order is heaven’s first law in other parts of the world, it is impossible to obtain service books that do not need to be supplemented by personal inquiries. The service book is of value in weeding out the most inefficient employees, but it can do little more. As in any other form of recommendation, the employer wishes to say the best possible thing for a servant that he may not injure his prospects of obtaining another place. Moreover, the law compels every employer to believe an employee innocent until he is proved guilty. The employer must state that the servant is honest unless he has proof positive to the contrary. He is not permitted to say that he is suspicious, or even to leave out the word “honest.” The policy is a necessary protection to the weaker class, but it must vitiate somewhat the absolute reliability of the testimonials given. The German service book has a place where all occupations are permeated by government control, but it cannot be introduced into America. We must work out our own system of improvement in household service as we have worked out our own political system.

Other measures have been suggested that call for only a passing notice. It is often proposed to call together a convention of housekeepers to discuss the subject. But the mass must be disintegrated before anything can be accomplished, and moreover the difficulty of calling together such a convention and of securing through it any permanent results is the same as is found in political circles in attempting to organize a citizens’ party.

Other housekeepers seriously advocate abolishing the public schools above the primary grade on the ground that girls are educated above their station, and they follow the plan of one who says, “I do not engage women who have been beyond the third reader and the multiplication table.” The quality of service obtained by such a policy is indicated by the remark of the father of a remarkably stupid girl, “She ain’t good for much; I guess she’ll have to live out.” No statement can be more fallacious than that girls are educated above their station. There can be no so-called “station” in a democratic country. We have given the reins to our democratic views politically, and we must abide by the industrial and social results.

Still other housekeepers advocate the introduction of housework into all the public schools, and thus securing well-informed “help.” But both this proposition and its converse overlook the fact that it is the function of the public school to educate, not to supply information on technical subjects.

In one large city a “Servant Reform Association” has been organized, with an office on a prominent street-corner, and its name conspicuously posted over the door and painted on all the window shades. Its clientele is very large and embraces some of the best-known residents of the city. Among other measures of reforming servants it plans for the establishment of schools to be equipped with every household appliance, and “to have for instructors women who are thoroughly schooled in the various branches of household duties and domestic economy,” but it does not state where such instructors are to be obtained. Nothing shows so clearly how the times are out of joint as does the name of such an association.

The plan most widely advocated and believed to contain the greatest possibilities for improvement in domestic service, is that of establishing training-schools for servants, such schools to have a regular course of study and to grant a diploma on the satisfactory completion of the work. Much can be said in favor of the theory of such schools. If universally established, they would greatly lessen the ignorance and inexperience of the employees—one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of improvement in the service. The diploma would be in effect a license without the objectionable features of the latter, and it would be a testimonial of capability and moral character more reliable than the personal recommendation of previous unknown employers. It would render possible a better gradation of wages, a more perfect organization of domestic work, and more satisfactory business relations between employer and employee. In no occupation is there greater need for systematic training. The army of incompetents in domestic service is not greater than in other occupations, but incompetency here is far more productive than elsewhere of inconvenience and positive suffering. Without such public and regular training every housekeeper is compelled to make a training-school of her own house, and too often she herself lacks the necessary information she ought to impart. But two test questions must be applied to the theory. First, as far as it has been carried out, has it accomplished what was expected of it? Second, is the training-school for servants in harmony with the educational, industrial, and social tendencies of the day?

The demand for such training-schools has been almost universal, and reports of their immediate establishment on a large scale have been repeatedly circulated through the press. One of the most widely spread rumors concerned a movement to be set on foot in connection with the World’s Fair in 1893 for the organization of a national body with branches throughout every state and county in the country, each of these branches to establish a training-school for servants wherever practicable, and another concerned a scarcely less extended work to be begun in Washington. As far as can be learned, however, the number of such schools actually established has been extremely limited, and most of these have been discontinued for lack of success. As far as the results have been concerned, it must be said that, while not a failure, they have been far from commensurate with the efforts expended. In one training-school with accommodations for twenty, where neither labor nor expense had been spared to make it a success, there were when visited but five persons in attendance, and these five were the most unpromising material that could be brought together to train for such service, one being a partial cripple, another very deaf, a third too young to take the responsibility of a general servant, a fourth was deficient in mental capacity, and the fifth was a Swedish girl who attended to learn English. Another school also having accommodations for twenty reported that the number had never been full. The most successful of them all had had, a year or two since, total attendance of about four hundred during its ten years’ existence.

The practical difficulties in the way of all these schools have been many. The minimum age of admission has been fixed at sixteen, but there has been constant pressure to make exceptions to the rule and take girls under that age. The course has been usually one of three months, but this time is insufficient for the thorough training of immature girls in household duties; yet to extend the course is to decrease the attendance. Those who enter such schools do so, not because those who have attended them have been unusually successful in securing work and retaining good positions, but because sent there by friends, guardians, pastors, or city missionaries. In no instance, so far as known, has a person entered a training-school because she found herself incompetent to fill the position she had taken, or from a desire to perfect herself in any branch of her work. Much has been accomplished through these schools for the individuals attending them; personal habits have been improved, better motives in life given,—everything that has been most admirable in a philanthropic way. But it must be said that they have done little or nothing towards accomplishing the object for which they were established; the effect in elevating domestic service, in increasing the supply of trained servants, in lessening the prevailing ignorance of household affairs, has been infinitesimal. The training-school for servants is and must be a failure as long as the class for whom it was founded will not voluntarily attend it in any considerable numbers for the sake of the instruction it is primarily intended to give. They will not attend it because while there is a theoretical demand for such schools on the part of employers there is no practical demand for them. Young women will not spend three months in learning the details of such work when they can receive high wages for doing it without such instruction; not until domestic service loses its distinctive marks of drudgery, menial servitude, and social degradation will the training-school receive any large accession to its numbers. Moreover, public opinion has not yet demanded that every housekeeper should have both a general and a technical knowledge of domestic affairs before she assumes the care of a household. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, and the training-school for employees cannot succeed so long as employers are content with unscientific methods in their own share of the household duties. It is often said that by the establishment of training-schools for nurses what was formerly a trade, held in little repute, has become a profession second only in importance to that of the physician, and that in a similar way the training-school for domestic servants would elevate domestic service. But a vital difference exists in the two cases. Until scarcely more than a generation ago the medical profession could lay little or no claim to being an exact science. Most medical schools were poorly equipped and had a short course of study, while all their processes were largely experimental. But the Civil War and the scientific studies resulting from it have made of surgery an exact science, while rapid strides in biological investigation have gone far towards making other branches of medicine also exact sciences. It has been well said that “educational forces pull from the top, they do not push from the bottom.” It has been the educational forces pulling from the top as a result of increased scientific knowledge among the leaders of the medical profession that have made the training-school for nurses a necessity. Not until similar forces pull from the top in the household through the scientific and economic investigation of the processes carried on there, will a permanent, successful training-school for employees be even a remote possibility.

It must be said also that the training-school for domestic servants must be a failure as long as it is out of harmony with the tendencies in all other fields of education and industry. Technical schools are everywhere springing up, and the demand for them is constantly increasing. But the technical school teaches general and fundamental principles, the wood carver learns drawing, the plumber chemistry, the architect mathematics, and the engineer mechanics. In each trade or profession the first step is the principle underlying it, and the second the practical application of the principle. In the training-school for servants with a three months’ course, the educational idea is and must be totally different. Those attending it are taken without examination, often they have had no previous education whatever, they may be of varying grades of intelligence and capability, and any attempt at classification according to these grades is impossible. Its members must learn how to cook without a knowledge of chemistry and physiology, to care for a room without knowing the principles of ventilation and sanitation, and to arrange a table in ignorance of form and color. The work must be learned by simple mechanical repetition—a method fast disappearing from every department of education.

Again, such a plan is in opposition to present political and social tendencies. A training-school for servants is an anomaly in a democratic country. No father or mother born under the Declaration of Independence will ever send a child to be trained as a servant. A striking illustration of this is found in recent accounts of a new building about to be erected in a large city for the use of a woman’s organization. Those in charge of the organization established a few years since a kitchen garden for the children of the poor. Families recommended by the Charity Organization Society were visited and the attendance of the young daughters of the family solicited. “At first not a few mothers objected on the ground that they did not wish to have their daughters trained to be servants, even if they were poor, but when it was explained that the object of the kitchen garden was to make the children more tidy and useful in their own homes the objection usually disappeared.” Yet in the face of this experience—a common one wherever kitchen gardens have been started—the managers of the organization have provided for the establishment of a training-school for servants.

The opposition to such schools on social grounds is not strange. No recognized industrial aristocracy is possible in America. There are no training-schools for masons, carpenters, day-laborers, or clerks. In the technical school the boy learns masonry, carpentry, and brick-laying, but in these schools there is no division of those attending into “classes for gentlemen” and “classes for laborers.” American men will never recognize one kind of training for a superior social class, and another for an inferior. The training-school for servants means the introduction of a caste system utterly at variance with democratic ideas. It has not been possible at any time since the abolition of slavery to educate any class in society to be servants; it will never again be possible in America. Democracy among men and aristocracy among women cannot exist side by side; friction is as inevitable as it was between free labor and slave labor in the ante-bellum days. Opportunity for scientific training in all household employments must ultimately be given in such a form that any and all persons can obtain it, but it can never be given in a school distinctively intended for the training of servants and called by that name.

Another plan, perhaps less widely but even more earnestly advocated by its supporters, is that of co-operative housekeeping. There has been much looseness of phraseology in referring to this plan, and many experiments have been called co-operative housekeeping which are such in no sense of the word. Co-operative housekeeping, pure and simple, as described by the pioneer in the movement, Mrs. Melusina Fay Peirce,[289] means the association in a stock company of not fewer than twelve or fifteen families. The first step is the opening of a co-operative grocery on the plan adopted by the Rochdale Pioneers, and this to be followed by the opening of a bakery, and later by a kitchen for cooking soups, meats, and vegetables. The next department to be organized is that of sewing, beginning with the establishment of a small dry-goods store, and developing from this the making of underclothes, dresses, cloaks, and bonnets. The last step is to organize a co-operative laundry. The main industries pursued in every house—cooking, sewing, and laundering—are thus to be taken out of the house and carried on at a central point, while the profits on all the retail purchases are ultimately to accrue to the purchasers.

The advantages in the scheme are in the saving of expense in buying, economy in the preparation of all the materials consumed, a division of labor on the part of the co-operators which enables each to follow her own tastes in work, and a removal of all difficulties with the subject of service by making the servants responsible to a corporation, not to individuals. The essential point in the whole plan, and that which justifies the name, is that each housekeeper is to take an active part not only in the management, but also in the actual work of the association, since co-operation ceases to be such if one individual or “manager” is paid for assuming the responsibility of the business.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Co-operative Housekeeping Association was organized in 1870 with forty shareholders and continued about one year. It approached more nearly than any other experiment that has been made to the ideal of its chief promoter, Mrs. Peirce, but failed in the opinion of its founder for three reasons: because all the shareholders did not patronize the co-operative store; because three departments of work—a bakery, kitchen, and laundry—were begun at the same time instead of being allowed to develop as experience should dictate; and because the whole was given over to the charge of a board of seven directors, one of whom was to be a paid officer and the manager of the entire business. The theory in its realization, therefore, lacked some of the essentials of a true co-operative enterprise, but even in this form it is believed to have been the only experiment that can in any real sense of the word be called co-operative housekeeping.

The plan of co-operative housekeeping would, if carried out successfully, undoubtedly remove many of the difficulties of the question of service. But it presents others, some of which are inherent in human nature and therefore not easily or speedily removed. It presupposes that all persons are equally endowed by nature with business instinct, which by cultivation will develop into business success; it overlooks the fact that ninety-five per cent of men do not succeed in business when conducting it independently, and that these are in the employ of the few gifted with executive talent, “one of the rarest of human endowments.” Again, the same difficulty exists as was presented to Louis XVIII. when he attempted to create a new order of nobility after the restoration of the Bourbon line; history tells us that he could find many willing to be dukes and earls but none willing to be anything less. Most persons are willing to co-operate in the management of an association, but modern industry, Nicholas Payne Gilman has well said, “takes on more and more the character of a civilized warfare in which regiments of brigadier-generals are quite out of place.”

Co-operation also requires for its success certain positive characteristics. It implies an ability to subordinate the individual to the general welfare, to sacrifice present comfort to future good, to decide whether an act is right or wrong by making it general, to put all questions on an impersonal basis. The principles on which the family is organized and the conditions surrounding the housekeeper make these necessary qualifications peculiarly hard to attain. Ideal co-operative housekeeping implies ideal co-operators, and these it will be difficult to find before the majority of the employers have more business training and more unselfishness than are now found.

All the arguments that prevail against co-operation in ordinary business enterprises must prevail against the system in household management. “All that is needed is the proper person to take the charge,” it is often explained. But it is at this very point that the theory breaks down. If the competent manager is secured, the plan ceases to be co-operative housekeeping. But the competent manager is the most difficult person in the world to find. “The man we want to manage our farm has a farm of his own,” said a city lawyer of the old family homestead; the same principle holds in the household. It must be said too that neither productive nor distributive co-operation has yet proved an unqualified success in other industries where the difficulties to be encountered are far less than in the case of that most complicated of organisms—the modern household. A larger number of successful experiments in co-operation must have been tried in this country in other and simpler fields before co-operative housekeeping can prove a panacea for all the troubles attending domestic service.

Certain practical difficulties have also been found. In all experiments in pure or partial co-operative housekeeping it has been found impossible to deliver cooked food hot and invariable in quality at the same hour to all the members of the association. In one city a company was organized as a business enterprise to furnish hot lunches to business men at their offices and also to supply family tables. The prices charged were double those of ordinary table-board, but the expenses were very heavy, no dividends were ever declared, and the object was ultimately changed to that of supplying clubs and private entertainments. That clock-like regularity in the serving of meals, demanded alike by health and business hours, is impossible, unless co-operation is universal, where families in the association reside from five to twenty blocks apart.

But the most insuperable objection to co-operative housekeeping as a remedy for the troubles with servants is the fact that the majority of persons do not wish it. The proposition suggests to many the homely adage of curing the disease by killing the patient. When its friends say in its favor, “Every time an apartment house is built having one common dining-room and one kitchen a blow is aimed at the isolated home,” the great majority of Americans rise up in protest. The semi-co-operative system of living is apparently rendered necessary in New York City by reason of the enormous value of land, but wherever the detached house having light on four sides is possible, as it is everywhere else, the American home-lover will rally to its support. Unless the desire for co-operative housekeeping and co-operative living becomes more general than it is at present, some other means of relief must be sought.

Much, however, of the so-called co-operative housekeeping is in reality co-operative boarding. This is true of “The Roby” experiment tried successfully for a time at Decatur, Illinois.[290] Fifty-four of the leading persons in the city formed a club, adopted a constitution and bylaws, elected officers, and found that through this organization they could “live off the fat of the land for $2.75 per week.” The plan in its essence is an old one; it has been followed for years by college students in institutions that do not provide dormitories. In many college towns it is rendered almost necessary by virtue of the residence there of many persons owning houses who wish to take lodgers but not boarders and of many women without capital who wish to act as housekeepers. But probably few college students consider it an ideal way of living, it is tolerable only at a time of life when new experiences are always welcome, and few have ever been known to continue it beyond college days.

Undoubtedly by a system of co-operative boarding many families could live better, at much less expense, and at a saving of time and certain kinds of friction. But co-operative boarding is to the employer what high wages are to the employee—he is willing to sacrifice something for what seems to him life, that is, in this case, the unity, privacy, quiet, and independence of family life. The friction with servants is obviated since the plan includes a housekeeper who is to stand between the co-operators and the employees, but the common interest of desiring freedom from the care of servants and of securing the best board at the lowest rates is not a tie strong enough to bind together those whose interests in other directions are most diverse. Co-operative boarding will do much for the vast army of persons obliged to board, but all such plans should receive their proper designation and not be called co-operative housekeeping. For the great majority of housekeepers who do not care to give up their individual homes, the system proposed will bring no relief.

Still a third scheme called co-operative housekeeping is that proposed by Mr. Bellamy.[291] This is a union of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative boarding, with the application to both of certain business principles already recognized in the housekeeping of to-day. In so far as it is a combination of the two plans already discussed, it is open to the same criticisms as are its component parts, while the business principles suggested are the result of the same unconscious, not conscious, co-operation that governs all industries.

It must be said, therefore, that all of these various measures of relief proposed to meet the difficulty fail, because, like the golden rule and the admission of the employee into the family life of the employer, they do not touch the economic, educational, and industrial difficulties; or because, like the license, the importation of negro and Chinese labor, the training-school for servants and co-operative housekeeping, they run at right angles to general economic, educational, and industrial progress. The question how to improve the present condition of domestic service is, however, not a hopeless one, but the answer to it must be based on an examination of the historical and economic principles underlying the subject.

CHAPTER XI POSSIBLE REMEDIES—GENERAL PRINCIPLES

It has been seen that any measure looking towards a lessening of the difficulties that stand in the way of securing at all times and in all places competent domestic employees, must fail of its object if it does not take into consideration economic history, economic conditions, and economic tendencies. Economic history has shown the remarkable effect of inventive genius and business activity on all household employments, and through them on domestic service; a study of economic conditions has shown the nature of the perplexities surrounding both employer and employee. What are the social and economic tendencies in accordance with which relief from present difficulties must be sought?

The first industrial tendency to be noted is that toward the concentration of capital and labor in large industrial enterprises. Not only have the factory and the mill superseded the individual system of manufactures, but the growth of “bonanza farms” and the increasing number of tenant farms show the same tendency in agriculture; the trust is the resort of wholesale business houses; the department stores of the day are driving out of the retail business circles the smaller houses of a generation ago; the pool may be considered an illustration of the same tendency at work in transportation industries.

A second tendency, forming the converse of the preceding one, is towards specialization in every department of labor. Adam Smith’s famous illustration of this principle—that he found ten persons able to make nearly five thousand pins in a day, while each person working alone could make but one pin—can be seen in every department of work except in the household. Everywhere the field of labor has been narrowed in order to secure the largest and best results.

A third tendency, growing out of these two, is towards the association and combination for mutual benefit of persons interested in special lines of work. Nearly every class of employers has its own special organization; the associated press, associated charities, local, state, and national educational associations, and associations of learned societies, show the influence of organization in other departments; nearly every class of employees also has its trade union or mutual benefit association; everywhere, except in the household, mutual interests are drawing together for protection, for consultation, for economy of forces and resources, for a score of reasons, those engaged in the same activities.

A fourth tendency is the result of the specialization of labor in its higher forms. As all industries become more highly organized, greater preparation for work is required wherever labor ceases to be purely mechanical. Trade schools, technical schools, and schools for training in special work are everywhere demanded, and the demand must in time be fully met. While specialization is the end, special training must be the means to accomplish it.

A fifth tendency is towards a realization of the fact that all who share in industrial processes should participate in the benefits resulting from their work, that “perpendicular” rather than “horizontal divisions” in labor should be the aim in all industry. This is seen in the various efforts made to introduce productive and distributive co-operation, profit sharing, and other measures intended to give employees a share in the results of their labors, and thus to take a personal interest in their work.

A sixth tendency is towards greater industrial independence on the part of women. This is an inevitable result of the substitution of the factory for the domestic system of manufactures, and of the entrance of women into all industrial pursuits at the time of the Civil War, as well as of the inherent demand in every person for some opportunity for honorable work. A comparison of the different census reports shows that the percentage of women engaged in remunerative occupations increases faster than the percentage of men so engaged. Massachusetts shows a larger percentage than any other state of women occupied in business industry, while the investigations of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor show that the marriage rate and the birth rate in that state are both increasing. The facts and conditions do not seem to show that the tendency is incompatible with home life.

One other semi-social and industrial tendency must be noted. It is the result of that systematic study of social conditions seen in the evolution of the principles that the best way to help a person is to help him to help himself, and that reasonable measures aim at the amelioration of some of the conditions under which work is performed, not at the cessation of the work itself. The application of these principles has led to wiser charities, to the Chautauqua movement, to university extension, to working-girls’ clubs, to enlarged opportunities everywhere for every class. These movements springing up in every locality mean that every individual is to have the opportunity of making the most of himself possible, and that the responsibility of so doing is to rest with him, not with society; they mean that ultimately the position in society of every person is to depend not on his occupation, but on the use he has made of these increasing opportunities for self-help and self-improvement; they mean that in time all social stigma will be removed from every occupation and work judged by its quality rather than by its nature; that in time, for example, a first-class cook will receive more honor than a second-class china decorator, or a third-rate teacher.

One general tendency in all business circles must also be mentioned—that towards increasing publicity in all business matters. It is coming to be recognized that society has the right to know certain general and even specific facts in regard to the conduct of affairs formerly guarded in jealous privacy by the individual. The National Census Bureau requires, for the benefit of society, an answer to a large number of personal questions, and the requirement is resisted only by the most ignorant. The state bureaus of labor have legal authority to obtain information in regard to the management of business enterprises which they wish to investigate. The salaries of all public employees are officially published, and legal inquiry is instituted when the expenses of such employees largely exceed the salary received. The number of joint-stock companies is increasing, and these companies are legally bound to render full and exact accounts of all receipts and expenditures. The Chinese wall of absolute privacy is practically retained only with reference to household occupations.

If then the question in domestic service is this: How can the supply of domestic servants be increased, or how can the demand for them be lessened? the only answer must be, by bringing household employments and household service into the current of these and other industrial and social tendencies. To state the case in detail, the problem is not so much how to improve the personal relationship between the employer and the employee as it is to decrease this relationship; not how to increase the number of household drudges, but to decrease the amount of household drudgery; not how to do more for domestics, but how to enable them to do more for themselves; not how to merge the individual home into the co-operative home or boarding house, but how to keep it still more intact by taking out of it as far possible that extraneous element—the domestic employee; not how to restore the old household system, but how to bring about adaptation to present conditions; not so much how to persuade more persons to go into domestic service, as to use to better advantage the time and strength of those already engaged in it; not how to induce sewing women in the tenement houses of New York City to engage in work for which they have neither the physical nor the intellectual qualifications,[292] but how to utilize the idle labor in boarding houses and in the homes of the so-called middle and upper classes.

The statement cannot be made with too great emphasis that no plan can be suggested that will enable a housekeeper whose inefficient employee leaves to-day to secure a better one to-morrow; a complicated social malady of long standing demands time and patience to work a cure or even a relief. Two classes of measures, however, looking towards an improvement in the character of the service can be suggested, the first general, the second specific. It is believed that both classes will conform to the general industrial and social tendencies enumerated.

In the first place there must be a truer conception on the part of both men and women of the important place that household employments occupy in the economy of the world. The utter neglect of the subject by economic students and writers must give place to a scientific investigation of an employment which is at least wealth-consuming if not wealth-producing. A very large part of the wealth produced in the world is consumed in the household, yet neither those who produce nor those who consume know on what principles it is done. Time-saving and labor-saving devices are made at enormous cost for uses in production, while time and strength incalculable are wasted through consumption. In no other occupation is there so much waste of labor and capital; in no other would a fraction of this waste be overlooked. It is idle to complain of poor servants and of poor mistresses so long as domestic service is divorced from general labor questions, and employers everywhere are ignorant of the economic laws, principles, and conditions underlying the household. Men and women might better give to the study of domestic service as an occupation the time and energy that now are absorbed in considering the vices and virtues of individual employees.

This truer conception of the place of household economics considered from the theoretical standpoint will give rise to a more just estimate of their place in a practical way. Those employers who “despise housekeeping,” who “cannot endure cooking,” who “hate the kitchen,” who “will not do menial work,” will come to regard household work in a different light. Indeed, until the members of this class, far too large in numbers, change either their opinion or their occupation, it is hopeless to look for a reform in domestic service. That “dignity of labor” so often prescribed as a panacea for the troubles in the kitchen must first be maintained in the parlor if reform is to come. The simple prescription of the remedy will not effect a cure. “To know the workman,” wrote Leclaire in 1865, “one must have been a workman himself, and above all remember it.” In a similar way the housekeeper must have not only a knowledge of household affairs, but a respect for them, and being presumably better educated and equipped, she must be the one to prove that the interests of employer and employee are the same.

Again, more systematic study of the subject in a general way must remove much of the ignorance, as well as of the aversion, that undoubtedly exists in regard to this occupation. Public sentiment has not yet demanded that when a woman assumes the care of a household she shall possess at least a theoretical knowledge of household affairs; it is deemed sufficient if she acquire it afterward at an enormous cost of time, patience, energy, sometimes even of domestic happiness. But public sentiment will make such demand when the economic functions of housekeeping are understood. Until a larger number of housekeepers understand at least the rudiments of the profession they have adopted, it is to be expected that ignorant and inexperienced employees will waste the substance of their employers, and fail to become skilled laborers, and that able, intelligent, and ambitious girls will be unwilling to enter an occupation in which the employers are as untrained in a scientific way as are the employees. Water cannot rise higher than its source. As long as inefficient service is accepted inefficient service will be rendered; as long as mistresses are ignorant of the difference between rights and extraordinary privileges, employees, like children, will continue to be spoiled by careless indulgence; “as long as women hate kitchen and household cares, and servants know that they know more than their employers, just so long will employers everywhere have eye-servants.”

A different conception must also come in regard to the work of woman, especially where the factor of remuneration is involved. An explanation is still needed for the fact that idleness is practically regarded as a vice in men and a virtue in women;[293] that a young man is condemned by society for saying “the world owes me a living,” while a young woman is praised for her womanliness when she says it by her life; that a wealthy woman must not receive remuneration for services for which compensation would be accepted by a wealthy man or by a poor woman. This does not mean that all women should engage in business enterprises, but that it should be honorable for them to do so, dishonorable for them to be ignorant of all means of self-support, and that they should receive adequate remuneration for all public services performed when men would be paid under the same circumstances. Household employments are too often in effect, though less often than in theory, belittled by both men and women, and they will continue to be until there is the freest industrial play in all occupations for women as well as for men. As long as household employments performed without remuneration are the only occupations for women looked upon with favor by society at large, just so long will this free industrial play be lacking. One effect of this is seen in the case of very many mothers who have been overworked and overburdened by household cares. The pendulum swings to the opposite end of the arc, and they declare that their daughters shall never work at all. The children therefore grow up in idleness and ultimately, when driven to work by necessity, drift into shops and factories. When household employments are removed from the domain of charity and sentiment and put on a business basis, when the interests of women are broadened, when they are better able “to distinguish between infinity and infinitesimals,” there will be a more intelligent understanding of the financial side of woman’s work.

The general remedies therefore must include a wider prevalence of education in the true sense of the word, not its counterfeit, information; that mental education which results in habits of accuracy, precision, and observation, in the exercise of reason, judgment, and self-control, and that education of character which results in the ability constantly to put one’s self in the place of another. There must be scientific training and investigation in economic theory, history, and statistics, especially in their application to the household, and an increased popular knowledge of all scientific subjects concerning the home, those which secure the prevention of economic and material waste in the household as well as those which concern the questions of production for it. The educational forces must “pull from the top” and draw domestic service into the general current of industrial development.

CHAPTER XII POSSIBLE REMEDIES—IMPROVEMENT IN SOCIAL CONDITION

Certain general principles have been suggested in accordance with which it seems reasonable to expect improvement in domestic service to be made. Of specific remedies, the first class to be suggested concerns the social degradation as yet entailed by the occupation. For the most part the oppressive conditions are the lack of all social and educational advantages, the use of an obnoxious epithet applied to the individuals of the class, the universal use of the familiar Christian name in address, the requirement of livery, enforced servility of manner, and the offering of fees to several large subdivisions of the class. Every one of these must seem a reasonable objection to one who can put himself in the place of another; they are among the weightiest arguments against entering the service; each one can be entirely removed, or so modified as to become unobjectionable. It is useless to look for any improvement in the character of domestic service until these oppressive conditions have been removed; but it is not vain to hope for an emancipation from them in time. The social ban has been removed from other occupations in which women have become wage earners—it has been removed from teaching,[294] the practice of medicine and law, and business industries—women can engage in all of these without fear of being ostracized. The relative social position of different occupations in which men engage has also changed. In colonial New England, the minister, not the lawyer, had the social precedence; in the Southern colonies the lawyer was an honored guest, while the chaplain of the plantation was a hireling who often married an indentured servant on the same plantation. Dentists, men “in trade,” brewers, and veterinary surgeons have in other localities all felt the lack of an assured place in society. Social barriers against both men and women are everywhere breaking down in the presence of high character, ability, education, and technical training; they will ultimately fall before men and women engaged in domestic service, who can bear these same tests of character, ability, education, and technical training.

In considering the specific social disadvantages, it must be conceded that the desire for greater social and intellectual opportunities is most reasonable. Mr. Higginson says in answer to the question, “Why do children dislike history?” “The father brings home to his little son, from the public library, the first volume of Hildreth’s United States, and says to him, ‘There, my son, is a book for you, and there are five more volumes just like it.’ He then goes back to his Sunday Herald, and his wife reverts to But Yet a Woman, or Mr. Isaacs.” The attitude of society towards social opportunities for domestic employees is much the same. Society demands the theatre, the opera, the parlor concert, the lecture, the dinner, the afternoon tea, the yacht race, the tennis match, the bicycle excursion, the coaching party, and expects the class lacking at present all resources within themselves to stay quietly at home and thus satisfy their desire for pleasure and intellectual opportunity. Country life sometimes proves lonely and distasteful to employers educated in the city. Is it less so to the employee lacking the opportunity for change enjoyed by others?[295]

Comparatively little can be done in the ordinary private home to meet these difficulties; but even if much could be done, it is at least an open question whether this would be the true remedy. In large establishments sitting-rooms can be provided for employees, but such establishments are few in number, and the fact that such rooms are in the home of another prevents that “good time,” the craving for which is so natural. Many employers are glad to give personal instruction evenings, but solitary instruction is even more defective for the domestic than it is for the children of the family. Enthusiasm must always come with numbers, and comparatively little can be done for employees through this means. But social opportunities and intellectual advantages can be provided, as has been done so successfully in the case of the employees of shops and factories. Social life everywhere tends towards clubs, societies, and organizations. Domestics can be encouraged to form clubs and societies through which parlors can be provided for social intercourse, and reading-rooms where intellectual needs will be met. If the domestic employee were taken from the home of the employer and encouraged to find for herself avenues of improvement and entertainment, her social condition would be greatly improved. She must be made to see that the reason why she does not rise to the social position to which she aspires, is not because her work is degrading, but because her conversation is often ungrammatical and lacking in interest, her dress sometimes untidy and devoid of taste, and her manner not always agreeable. She must do her part towards improving her social condition. It is true, that probably at first comparatively few domestics would avail themselves of such privileges, but just as long as social and intellectual advantages do not exist anywhere for this class, just so long will the intelligent and capable young woman most needed in this occupation shun it for others where such opportunities do exist.

The stumbling-block in the use of the word “servant” is easily removed. The exclusive application of this word to domestic employees must be abolished before the class most desired in the occupation will enter it. As has been done in every other occupation, a word like “employer” must be substituted for “master” and “mistress,”—terms associated only with a system of apprenticeship or slavery,—while “domestic,” “housekeeper,” or some other descriptive term must be used for “general servant,” the words “cook,” “waitress,” and “maid” being unobjectionable for other classes of service.[296] As a matter of fact the word as now used is inappropriate in characterizing the work expected of an efficient domestic employee. Division of labor has made her in reality, though not in position, not a menial, a drudge, a slave, but a co-operator in the work of the household. The cook who prepares the raw material for consumption is not more a servant than is the farmer who produces the raw material; indeed her work is justly considered skilled labor, while that of the agricultural laborer is often unskilled. The cook is the co-operator with her employer in the same sense as the farmer is a co-operator in the industrial system; and the term “servant” as indicating a menial applies to her as little as it does to him. New words are coined and pass into familiar usage in a short time, old words become obsolete, new meanings are given old terms, and it is possible in the course of a few years to substitute for the present objectionable usage of this word a term which will describe more definitely the duties of the position and at the same time remove one of the most serious obstacles in the way of improving the character of the occupation.[297]

The inferiority implied in the use of the Christian name in address is less clearly seen and less easily removed because its effects are more subtile. It may not be possible to attempt any immediate or general change, but a compromise is possible in giving the title to married men and women in domestic service, since marriage is supposed to carry with it added dignity. The Japanese custom of addressing one’s own employees by a familiar term, but the employees of another by a title of respect,[298] is also a possible compromise. It seems difficult to find weighty arguments in favor of refusing to a class of self-supporting men and women the title of respect accorded in all other occupations.

The cap and apron are in themselves not only unobjectionable, but they have certain very definite advantages. They are conducive to neatness and economy and moreover form a most becoming style of dress. The picturesque effect of both is appreciated by all young women who take part in public charitable entertainments, it was understood by the matrons of an earlier generation, and it has formed the theme of many letters written on foreign soil. No costume in itself could be more desirable or better adapted to the work of the wearers, and a more general rather than a more restricted use of this form of dress should be advocated on theoretical grounds. But the cap and apron as worn do not always indicate a desire on the part of the wearer for neatness, economy, and tasteful attire, nor always an appreciation of these things on the part of the employer. They are regarded as a traditional badge of servitude, and while so regarded it seems unwise to force them on those unwilling to wear them. Moreover the cap and apron while serving admirably their place within the house have no raison d’être out of doors; the cap affords no protection from heat, cold, or storms, and the apron is inappropriate for street wear. The cap and apron are appropriate and desirable in all places where they would be worn by the employer under the same circumstances, they are inappropriate elsewhere and hence out of taste. If employees as a class would recognize the many advantages of the costume within doors and adopt it universally, and if employers would accept its limitations out of doors and abandon the requirement of it there at all times, the vexed question of livery would seem to be answered.

The servility of manner demanded—at least in public—of all domestics is an anomaly in a country where there is no enforced recognition of social and political superiors. The price paid for it—high wages, poor service, constant change, household friction—seems a heavy one and the excuse for it small. As long as domestic service lacks the safety valve of personal independence and the outward expression of self-respect, just so long is there danger of too great repression and consequent explosion. No genuine reform in domestic service is possible while this theory of outward servility is enforced.

The most objectionable of all the manifestations of social inferiority—the feeing system—has its economic as well as its social side and will be considered by itself in the chapter on profit sharing in domestic service.

These social barriers that now prevent so effectually the entrance into domestic service of intelligent, well-educated, capable, and efficient persons can all be swept away if employers as a class are willing to make the effort. This effort will involve in some cases the relinquishing of a favorite theory that employees can be made a part of the family with which they are externally connected and, instead of this, assisting them to live their own independent lives as citizens of the community in a normal, happy way. It will involve in other cases abandoning the assumption that domestic employees belong to a separate and obnoxious class in society and cannot be met as individuals on the same plane as are other persons of like attainments. It will involve in still other cases the sacrifice of that personal vanity that is gratified by the constant presence of those deemed to be of an inferior station. If employers are willing to yield all of the points now often unconsciously maintained by them in opposition to the teachings of political and industrial history, the social objections that now hold against domestic service as an employment will disappear. Sir Henry Sumner Maine has well said, “The true equality of mankind lies in the future, not in the past.” It is this true equality of the future, not the fictitious equality of the past, that must free domestic service from the social ill-repute it now bears.

CHAPTER XIII POSSIBLE REMEDIES—SPECIALIZATION OF HOUSEHOLD EMPLOYMENTS

The efforts to remove the social stigma that now brands domestic service will not alone accomplish the desired result. Another means of lessening the difficulties in the modern household is to put all household employments on the same business basis as all employments outside of the household. The principles which lie at the foundation of modern business activities are division of labor and unconscious co-operation. This statement does not mean that both of these principles are carried out perfectly, but that industrial progress has been made and is being made along these lines, that the advance already made by household employments has been in the same direction, and that the reforms proposed for the household that diverge from these lines, however wise in themselves, cannot lead to the best results because they are out of the current of general progress.

In considering the historical phase of the subject, a long list of articles was suggested[299] which were formerly made within the household, but are now made out of the house both better and more cheaply than they could be made at home.

A list can be drawn up of other articles made out of the house, which if made in factories are inferior, and if purchased through the woman’s exchanges, though as well or even better prepared, are more expensive because the demand for such articles made in the homes of others has up to this time been limited. The articles in this transitional state are vegetable and fruit canning, the making of jellies, pickles, and preserves, the baking of bread, cake, and pastry, the preparation of soups, pressed meats, cold meats, ice-cream, and confectionery, condensed, sterilized, and evaporated milk, and the making of butter not yet abandoned in all rural homes. The transitional list also includes the making of underclothes for women and children, which can be made more cheaply out of the house but not always so well; and millinery and dressmaking, which can be done better but at greater expense. There is every indication that all the articles in this transitional state must soon be enumerated among those articles made both better and more cheaply out of the house than within.

A third list can be made of articles that are now seldom if ever manufactured out of the house but which can be made elsewhere. This list includes in the first place bread and cake of every description; it is possible by taking all of this work out of the house to save, considered in the aggregate both as regards the individual and the community, an enormous waste of time and fuel and at the same time to secure through the application of scientific principles articles often more uniform and superior in quality to what can be produced in the home.[300] A second class includes the preparation of all vegetables for cooking. It is not sentiment but economic principle that should release the human hand from performing this part of housework, more purely mechanical and more justly entitled to be called drudgery than any other work carried on in the house. A few years since coffee was roasted in every kitchen. If it has been found that an article requiring such delicate treatment as this can be prepared by business firms better than it can be in the household oven, there can be no serious obstacle in the way of delivering at the door all vegetables ready for cooking.[301] Compensation for the additional cost at first incurred would be found in the hygienic advantage of removing from many cellars the supply of winter vegetables. A third class of articles includes the preparation of all cold meats, half-cooked meats, as croquettes, all stuffed meats, as fowl and game, all “made” dishes, as salads and cold desserts, and the cooking of all articles which need only heating to make ready for use. The careful study of a large number of elaborate menus as well as of more simple bills of fare shows a very small proportion of articles which could not be made out of the house and sent in ready for use or requiring only the application of heat. The Aladdin oven constructed on scientific principles renders the cooking and heating of food a most simple matter. The sending of hot food to individual homes has in no case as far as can be learned proved a success, but the delivery of all articles ready for the final application of heat is possible through business enterprise and scientific experiment.

This partial, although not entire, solution of the problem of domestic service, by taking a large number of servants out of the house and by having a large part of the work now done by them in the house done elsewhere, is in direct line with the progress made in other occupations.

It was estimated by Mr. Gallatin in 1810[302] that two-thirds of the clothing worn in the United States was the product of family manufacturing—then in a flourishing state. During the twenty years following, a part of this family weaving and spinning was transferred to factories, and this transfer created the great factory industry. Its rapid growth was due to the fact that the power loom and the factory took the place of the hand loom and of home manufacturing. A similar change has taken place in the manufacture of cheese. Until about 1830 all cheese was made at home, and in 1860 not more than twenty cheese factories had been built.[303] After that time factories multiplied rapidly, until now practically all cheese is factory made. The demand for ready-made clothing for men was a generation ago very small. It grew out of a demand on the part of sailors, and was increased in large proportions at the time of the Civil War; the manufacture of such articles is now so firmly established in our industrial system that a return to the home system of manufacturing, even in the most isolated and primitive communities, would be as impossible as the revival of the spinning wheel. The demand for ready-made clothing for women is nearly as great and is annually increasing through the facilities offered by all large retail houses for shopping by mail. The tailoress and the maker of shirts have disappeared from the homes of their employers and have set up establishments of their own, or have become responsible to large business houses; the dressmaker and the seamstress are fast following in their footsteps, and the cook must set her face in the same direction.

The trend in this direction can be seen in many ways. The growing prevalence of camping has increased the demand for articles of food ready for use, and even tea, coffee, and soups are delivered hot for the benefit of pleasure seekers.[304] The development of Western resources by Eastern capitalists has also increased the demand for such articles, and at least one housekeeper among the Black Hills of South Dakota, one hundred miles from a railroad station, speaks casually of doing her marketing in Chicago, and a housekeeper in North Carolina gives frequent and elaborate lunches through caterers in Philadelphia. The tendency even among persons of moderate means is more and more towards the employment of caterers for special afternoon and evening entertainments, although in villages and small towns this course as yet involves the employment of persons from large cities. The practice is not uncommon for the women connected with church organizations to hold every Saturday afternoon sales for the benefit of the society, of all articles of food that can be prepared the previous day for Sunday dinners and teas.[305]

The most important medium for the sale of such commodities is the Woman’s Exchange.[306] It has already become an economic factor of some little importance, and it will become of still greater importance when it is taken out of the domain of charity and sentiment and becomes self-supporting on a business basis. One of its most valuable results is that it has set a high standard for work and has insisted that this standard be reached by every consignor, not only once or generally, but invariably. It has maintained this standard in the face of hostile criticism and the feeling that a charitable organization ought to accept poor work if those presenting it are in need of money. It has shown that success in work cannot be attained by a simple desire for it or need of it pecuniarily. It has taught that accuracy, scientific knowledge, artistic training, habits of observation, good judgment, courage, and perseverance are better staffs in reaching success than reliance upon haphazard methods and the compliments of flattering friends. It has raised the standard of decorative and artistic needle work by incorporating into its rules a refusal to accept calico patchwork, wax, leather, hair, feather, rice, splatter, splinter, and cardboard work. It has taught many women that a model recipe for cake is not “A few eggs, a little milk, a lump of butter, a pinch of salt, sweetening to taste, flour enough to thicken; give a good beating and bake according to judgment.”

But still more it has opened up to women what has been practically a new occupation. Domestic work within the house performed by members of the family without fixed compensation and by those not members of the family with compensation had been the previous rule. The Exchange has shown that it is possible for the women of a family to prepare within the house for sale outside many articles for table consumption, both those of necessity and luxury. Innumerable instances are on record of women who within the past fifteen years have supported themselves wholly or in part by making for general sale or on orders different articles for the table.[307]

It seems inevitable that eventually all articles of food will be prepared out of the house except those requiring the last application of heat, and that scientific skill will reduce to a minimum the labor and expense of this final stage of preparation. This change is in direct line with the tendency towards specialization everywhere else found in that it thus becomes possible for every person to do exclusively that thing which he or she can do best; it allows the concentration of labor and capital and thus by economizing both secures the largest results; it permits many women to retain their home life and at the same time engage in remunerative business; it improves the quality of all articles consumed, since they are produced under the most favorable conditions; it brings the work of every cook into competition with the work of every other cook by providing a standard of measurement now lacking and thus inciting improvement; it is the application of the principle of unconscious co-operation and therefore in harmony with other business activities. More definitely, as one illustration, it permits all fruits to be canned, pickled, and preserved in every way in the locality where they are produced at a cost ultimately less than can now be done when fruit is shipped to cities and there sold at prices including high rents; it prevents a glut in the market of such perishable articles by providing for their preservation on farms and in villages and subsequent transportation to cities at leisure; it makes it possible to utilize many abandoned farms in the East which could be used as fruit farms but are too remote from shipping centres to permit the transportation of ripe fruit; it ultimately lightens the labors of many women on farms by enabling them to purchase in cities many articles now produced by them at a disadvantage. The canning in cities, by individual families, of fruits, often in an over-ripe condition, is as anomalous as would be to-day the making of dairy products in city homes. The preservation of fruit is but one example of articles that could be prepared better and more cheaply in the country than in the city. Miscellaneous articles of every description, as plum-pudding, boned turkey, chicken broth, jelly, croquettes and salad, minced meat, pressed veal, bouillon, calf’s-foot jelly, pure fruit juices, blackberry cordial, and a score of other articles, could be added to the list.

It is sometimes objected that this plan of taking out of the house to as great an extent as possible all forms of cooking lessens the individuality of the home by requiring all persons to have the same articles of food. But the objection presupposes a limited variety of articles, while the method suggested must result in an unlimited variety, as has been the case in regard to articles used for wearing apparel since the custom has been established of having so many made out of the house. It presupposes also that individuality depends on externals. The gentleman who wishes to preserve his individuality through his cook could also preserve it through employing a private tailor, but he gladly sacrifices it in the latter case for the better work of one who serves a hundred other customers as well. Individuality is preserved when a person builds his own house, but the doubtful benefit of the result is suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes when he says, “probably it is better to be built in that way than not to be built at all.” The individuality of the present generation is certainly not less than that of the preceding one when all clothing worn by a family was made up in the house, or of an earlier one when all cloth was spun and woven, as well as made up, in the house, or of a still more remote one when our ancestors troubled themselves comparatively little about either the weaving or the making. The very perfection of the principle of the division of labor makes possible the expression of the greatest individuality in that it offers the possibility of selection from a hundred varieties whereas before no choice was given. The ability to choose between the work of a hundred cooks permits a truer individuality than does the command of the services of but one. Whims, caprices, and eccentricities sometimes masquerade as individuality and are not always entitled to respect.

Another form of work now done in the house that could be done outside is laundry work. The inconveniences resulting from the derangement of the household machinery according to the present method have formed the theme of many jests; a serious consideration of the subject must lead to the conclusion that this system results in great waste as well as in unnecessary wear and tear of the household machinery. An objection on hygienic grounds is sometimes made to the proposal to have articles of clothing laundered out of the house together with articles sent by other families. But science has already accomplished much at the bidding of business enterprise, and this objection can be overcome. Even as it is the question may well be asked whether the price paid is not a heavy one for individual laundresses. The vast army of persons who board are compelled to send out articles to be laundried, and this is apparently done without serious results. A beginning has been made in many families where a competent laundress cannot be secured by sending to public laundries all starched clothing, especially all collars and cuffs. The laundries of Troy, New York, have branches for the reception and delivery of goods in all parts of the country, and laundry many articles better and more cheaply than can be done at home. The amount of space now occupied in cities for laundering purposes that could be used for business or for homes is far from inconsiderable. It seems not altogether unreasonable to believe that if the space now occupied by laundries in individual homes could be used for other purposes rents would be perceptibly lower. On economic grounds alone this generation should relegate the washing machine and the wringer to the attic or the front parlor, where it has already placed the spinning wheel of its ancestors.

Still another field is open for business enterprise in connection with the household. A very large part of the work connected with it concerns the care of the house and grounds. This includes the semi-annual housecleaning and the cleaning of windows, floors, brass, silver, and lamps; the sweeping, dusting, and general care of rooms, including the special attention that must be given to books, pictures, and bric-à-brac; the care of lawns, walks, porches, and furnaces; the repairing of articles of clothing and furniture; table service and chamber service. Here again economic tendencies are showing themselves. Much if not all of this work can be done by the piece or by the hour, and men and women are everywhere taking advantage of the fact.[308] A very large part of the work of the household can be thus done, especially if housekeepers are willing to waive the tradition that silver must be cleaned on Thursdays, sweeping done on Fridays, and all sleeping-rooms put in order before nine o’clock in the morning.

One other measure of relief concerns the purchase of supplies. Marketing is a science and might be made a profession. At present it is usually done in a haphazard, make-shift fashion. It is done by the head of the household on his way to business and thus done in haste; or orders are given through a clerk who goes from house to house and thus serves primarily the firm he represents, while at the same time the purchaser loses the benefit of competition in the markets; or commissions are given by telephone and the customer has no opportunity of inspecting the goods before purchase; or marketing is done by the mistress of the household, who is unable to reach the markets in time to make her purchases with the care that should be given; or it is done by the cook, who may know the best articles to purchase but is ignorant of their money value. It requires time, skill, and experience to purchase judiciously the supplies for a household, and in many households time, skill, and experience are lacking. It would seem possible for one person to do the marketing for fifteen or twenty families, taking the orders at night and executing them in the morning. Supplies could then be purchased in quantity, this gain would pay the commission of the purchaser, and marketing would be done in a much more satisfactory manner than it is at the present time. At the same time such a plan would relieve the members of individual households of the burden and care of a difficult part of household management.

All of these measures suggested must tend ultimately to take as far as possible the domestic employee out of the house, letting her perform her work through the operation of unconscious business co-operation. This method would enable a large number of women to go into household employments who have ability in this direction but who now drift into other occupations which permit them to maintain their own home life. It is generally assumed that an unmarried woman has no desire for a home and no need of a place that she can call her own. When she goes into domestic employment, therefore, she must merge her individual life into that of her employer and relinquish all the social instincts, although as strong in her as in another. But this is what many are not willing to do. If the opportunity were presented of performing housework and remaining at home, large numbers would in time enter the work. Many who have no homes would still be glad to share the home of an employer, but where no alternative is presented, as under the present system, except where negroes are employed, the requirement of residence becomes irksome and is a hindrance in this as it would be in any other industry. It is also true that many employees particularly dislike to live in flats. The sleeping accommodations are generally poor, with little light or ventilation, and all parts of the household are cramped and crowded. To take the employee out of the modern flat and let her go to her own home or lodging place would be a boon to both employer and employee. The plan proposed also lessens materially the amount of care and responsibility now incurred by the employer, since it decreases the number of personal employees. The presence of the employee in the family is a disadvantage to the household of the employer as well as to the employee. Again, it enables large numbers of women who have only a few hours each day or week to give to outside work to do it in their own houses or in the homes of others without neglect of their own households. Moreover, it lessens much of the difficulty that now exists owing to the migratory habits of the modern family. The question of what shall be done with the employees of a household during the summer and how new ones shall be secured in the autumn is answered in a measure if the work performed by them can be done by the piece, hour, or season and a large part of the family supplies can be purchased ready for use. Then, too, it renders both employer and employee more independent. Whether the desire for independence is right or wrong is not the question—it is a condition and must be met.

It has often been pointed out that the aristocracy of the Church broke down at the time of the Reformation, that the aristocracy of the State was overthrown by the Bastile mob, that aristocracy in education is yielding to the democratic influences of university extension, and that aristocratic economics are disappearing in the light of the industrial discussions of the day. The aristocracy of the household must succumb to this universal desire for personal independence on the part of employees.

The plan suggested of specializing household industries to as great an extent as possible and encouraging the domestic employee to live in her own home has much in its favor. It substitutes for the responsibility to an individual employer, so irritating to many and so contrary to the industrial spirit of the age, the responsibility to a business firm. It throws the responsibility for success on the individual employees by bringing them into more immediate competition with other workers in the same field. It provides a channel through which advance becomes possible and also independent business life if executive ability is present. It reduces house rent in proportion as the number of employees is lessened, or it places at the disposal of the family a larger portion of the house than is now available for their personal uses. It simplifies the problem in all families where there is more work than can be done by one employee but not enough for two. It makes possible such a division of labor in the household as will discriminate between skilled and unskilled labor. Under the present system the employer expects to find in one individual for $3 per week and expenses, a French chef, an Irish laundress, a discreet waitress, a Yankee maid-of-all-work, a parlor maid a Quaker in neatness, all this, “with the temper of a saint and the constitution of a cowboy thrown in.” Expectations are often disappointed and the blame is thrown, not on a bad system, but on the individual forced to carry it out. The separation of skilled and unskilled labor permits each one to do a few things well and prevents the friction inevitable when the skilled workman is called upon to do unskilled work, or the unskilled laborer to perform tasks requiring the ability of an expert. It is a more flexible system of co-operation than the one technically known as such, since all articles are purchased, not of a certain manufacturer or dealer whom it has been agreed upon by contract to patronize, but wherever it is most convenient. It is easily adapted to the present system of living in flats and apartment houses rendered almost necessary in some places by high rents; this way of living makes it difficult to employ a large number of domestics, but on the other hand it makes it possible to do without them. It enables the domestic employee to have the daily change in going back and forth from her work which the shop-girl and the factory-girl now have. The domestic employee now has out-of-door exercise not oftener than once or twice a week, and the effect is as deleterious physically, mentally, and morally as a similar course would be in other walks of life. It must decrease that pernicious habit, so degrading to the occupation as well as to the individual, of discussing the personal characteristics of both employers and employees, since the relationship between the two is changed from the personal to the business one. It elevates to the rank of distinct occupations many classes of housework now considered drudgery because done at odd moments by overworked employees. It must in time result in many economic gains, one illustration of which is the fact that the kitchen could be heated by the furnace and all cooking done by kerosene, gas, or electricity; on the other hand, the necessities of employers would cease to be the gauge for measuring the minimum of work that could be done by employees without losing their places.

Two objections are sometimes raised to this plan. The first is that the cost of living would be increased. This would undoubtedly be the effect at first, but it is not a valid objection to this mode of housekeeping. The list of articles now made out of the house shows that every article of men’s dress is made more cheaply and better than formerly when made at home. This is due to the fact that in the transitional period men of means were willing to pay a higher price for goods made out of the house for the sake of obtaining a superior article. Competition subsequently made it possible for men of moderate means to share in the same benefit. The same tendency is seen among wage-earning women. They could make their own dresses at less expense than they can hire them made, but it would be done at a loss of time and strength taken from their own work, and they prefer to employ others. Moreover cost of living is a relative term—an increase in the family income makes it possible to employ more service and therefore to live better than before. Families of wealth now have two alternatives, either to employ more domestics within the home, or to purchase more ready-made supplies. The alternative usually chosen is the former, but if such families would choose the second and instead of employing additional domestics would, as far as practicable, purchase ready-made supplies for the table and have more work done by the hour, day, or piece, as great ease of living would be secured as through the employment of additional service within the house under the present system. Though the cost of living might be increased, it is a price many would be glad to pay for a release from the friction of a retinue of domestics in the home. When it has become the custom for families of wealth to have few or no domestics under their own roofs, the great problem of how people of limited incomes can have comfortable homes will be solved.

The second objection is the fact that it would take from the women of the household much of their work. The problem, however, has not been to provide a means of excusing from their legitimate share in the work of the world one half of its population, but to use that labor at the least cost of time and strength. The argument that would maintain the present system because it provides women with work is the same as that which destroyed the machines of Arkwright and Crompton; it is the argument that keeps convicts in idleness lest their work should come into competition with the work of others; it is the opposition always shown to every change whereby the number of workers in any field is at first lessened. But the plan proposed does not contemplate abolishing household work for women, but changing its direction so that it may be more productive with less expenditure than at present. It calls for specialization of work on a business basis, rather than idleness or charity. It asks that the woman who can bake bread better than she can sweep a room should, through unconscious co-operation, bake bread for several families and hire her sweeping done for her by one who can do it better than she. It asks that the woman who likes to make cake and fancy desserts but dislikes table service should dispose of the products of her labor to several employers, rather than give her time to one employer and do in addition other kinds of work in which she does not excel. It asks that the woman who cannot afford to buy her preserves and jellies at the Woman’s Exchange but crochets for church fairs slippers that are sold at a dollar a pair shall dispose of the products of her industry at a remunerative rate and buy her jellies put up in a superior manner. The plan allows the person who has skill in arranging tables and likes dining-room work, but dislikes cooking, to do this special kind of work, when otherwise she would drift into some other light employment. It provides that women in their own homes who are now dependent for support on the labors of others shall have opened to them some remunerative occupation. The preparation of food in small quantities always secures more satisfactory results than when it is prepared in larger amounts. Women in their own homes can give foods the delicate handling necessary for the best results and at the same time use the spare hours that are now given to unprofitable tasks. It makes every member of the family a co-operator in some form in the general family life. What is needed indeed in the household is more co-operation among the different members of it rather than conscious co-operation with different families. It has been recently pointed out that the carrying of electricity as a motive power to individual houses may cause a partial return to the domestic system of manufacturing which will be carried on under more favorable conditions than was the old domestic system.[309] This is in the future—its possibility is only hinted at. But the domestic system of housework, if that expression may be used to distinguish it from the present individual system, and the proposed system of unconscious co-operation, enables women to work in their own homes and, by exchange of such commodities and services as each can best dispose of, to contribute to the general welfare.

The plan of specialization of household employments has already been put into partial operation by many housekeepers and its success attested by those who have tried it.[310] Conscious co-operative housekeeping has in nearly every case proved a practical failure, but the unconscious co-operation that comes through business enterprise has brought relief to the household in many directions and it is one of the lines along which progress in the future must be made.

CHAPTER XIV POSSIBLE REMEDIES—PROFIT SHARING

Domestic service, as has been seen, is accompanied by certain social conditions that prevent many from entering the occupation. The present unclassified state of household employments operates in the same way. But in addition to this lack of organization, other industrial disadvantages are found. These are the lack of all opportunity for promotion within the service, the lack of kindred occupations opening out from it, the irregularity of working hours, and confinement evenings and Sundays, the necessary competition between those of American birth and foreign born and colored employees, and the lack of personal independence. These, in addition to the unorganized condition of the work, are the industrial disadvantages that tell most strongly against the occupation; they are the economic maladies that can be alleviated only by the application of economic remedies.

The attempt has been made to show how the lack of organization in household employments can be partially met by taking out of the house a large part of the work now performed there, and having much of what must necessarily remain done by the piece, hour, day, or season, thus securing better specialization of work and directing it into the current of industrial progress. The second group of industrial difficulties enumerated must in a similar way be met by measures that have proved successful in similar fields.

The vexed questions of wages and hours of labor in the industrial world are still unsettled, but in certain industries some little progress towards a solution of those difficulties has been made through the introduction of the profit-sharing system. In order to answer the question whether profit sharing could be introduced with advantage into domestic service, it is necessary to consider somewhat in detail the question, What is profit sharing, and also the question, What have been its advantages in general economic society?

Profit sharing, as defined by Mr. Carroll D. Wright, is the term that “may be applied to any arrangement whereby labor is rewarded in addition to its wages, or in lieu of wages, by participation in the profits of the business in which it is employed. Benefits of various kinds—as insurance, schools, libraries, and beautiful surroundings, so far as maintained by employers out of their profits and enjoyed by employees as an addition to what their wages would purchase—would have to be regarded, in a strict analysis, as an indirect form of profit sharing.”[311] Mr. Nicholas Payne Gilman defines it as “the method of rewarding labor by assigning it a share in the realized profits of business in addition to wages.”[312] Mr. D. F. Schloss considers it “an arrangement under which an employer agrees with his employees that they shall receive, in partial remuneration of their labor, and in addition to their ordinary wages, a share, fixed beforehand, in the profits of his business.”[313] The International Congress on Profit Sharing, held in Paris, in 1889, declared it to be “a voluntary agreement, by virtue of which an employee receives a share, fixed beforehand, in the profits of an undertaking.”

The history of profit sharing is short, and can easily be recalled. It began in 1842 with the Maison Leclaire in Paris, and has been subsequently introduced into many business houses in France and Switzerland, countries where the economic conditions lend themselves readily to its progress. Its adoption in Germany has been less extensive, while the English industrial system has hitherto seemed hostile to it, although Mr. D. F. Schloss in his recent Report claims that a larger number of experiments in profit sharing have been made in England than in any other country. Probably about one fourth of the business establishments conducted on this principle are found in the United States.

What are the advantages that have resulted from this fifty years of more or less extensive experience with the system? There is first the fact that it results in the development of what Mr. Carroll D. Wright has called “the group of industrial virtues.” This group includes diligence, zeal, caretaking, vigilance, punctuality, fidelity, continuity of effort, willingness to learn, a spirit of co-operation, and a personal interest in all business affairs. In addition to these virtues, other positive advantages have been noted by those who have tried the system. “An appreciable percentage of the occasions of worry, which all large employers experience, have disappeared,” writes Mr. T. W. Bushill, of Coventry, England.[314] M. Billon, of Geneva, states as one result of his experiment, “Superintendence became easy for us, and from that time we could, without fear of offending any one, show ourselves exacting in details to which previously we were obliged to close our eyes.”[315] The Peace Dale Manufacturing Company began profit sharing “not to make money in the positive sense, but to save waste.”[316] This saving of waste is seen in the efforts to economize time and materials and in the additional care with which machinery and all appliances for work are used. Various English firms have been most successful in attaining this end, stating that they find “increasing care to avoid spoilt work and waste both of time and material”; that “waste is guarded against”; that there is care in handling materials, and that “especially waste of raw material is avoided.”[317] Another gain is found in the identification of the interests of employer and employees and the consequent harmony between capital and labor; “the occurrence of a strike in a profit-sharing establishment is believed to have been a rare event,” says Mr. Schloss.[318] The advantage to the employer of this identification of interest is seen in the ability to obtain “a steadier and superior class of workers”; in the fact that “the knowledge that there is such a scheme brings all the best workmen” to the firm employing it; that “workers remain year after year”; and that “it tends to secure and retain the best workers.” Its good effects on the character of the work are seen when “an efficient man is very soon pricked up to greater diligence by his fellow workers”; in securing through it “the maximum of effort”; “in a steady pulling up all around”; when it “makes the men keener after business and sharper in keeping down expenses.”[319]

It would seem difficult to introduce the scheme into a business like that of tea-blending, but a London firm that has practised it thirteen years states that the effect is “to make the clerks willing to exert themselves in an especial manner, when the occasion arises, because they know that if they show themselves unable to cope with the mass of work to be done, then the staff must be increased; and they do not care to see their bonus diminished by an augmentation of the numbers entitled to participation.”[320]

The question naturally arises as to how far these gains reimburse the employer for the financial cost of profit sharing. The chairman of the South Metropolitan Gas Company of London writes, “I state unhesitatingly that the Company is recouped the whole of the amounts—some £40,000—paid as a bonus since the system was started.”[321] The managing director of the New Welsh Slate Quarry Company gives it as his personal belief “that we are recouping every penny of bonus and more;” and similar testimony comes from others.

Yet this is putting the matter on the lowest plane. The system “converts the industrial association of employer and employees into a moral organism, in which all the various talents, services, and desires of the component individuals are fused into a community of purpose and endeavor.”[322] A natural result, moreover, is a general elevation in the standards of morals. Most of all, in an individual way it is of help to the employee; “to assist a person in improving his condition by his own efforts is to make a man of him.”[323]

What can be learned from these successful experiences in profit sharing that will be of value in domestic service? The usual difficulties that beset the employer of domestic labor are lack of interest, desire for change, negligence, waste of time, extravagance in the use of materials, in a word, the absence of the industrial virtues. If these very difficulties—all of which exist elsewhere—are partially or entirely obviated by the employer of other forms of labor through the system of profit sharing, may it not reasonably be expected that they could be met in domestic service by the employment of similar means?

Domestic service, it is true, is not a wealth-producing occupation, but it is wealth-consuming probably beyond any other employment. The profit, therefore, must be negative, that is, economy in the use of time, materials, and appliances for work. It is in precisely these ways that profit sharing has been most successful, and the wage system most unsatisfactory. Under the wage system the employer of domestic labor pays for time rather than for quality of service, and employers therefore constantly complain that employees do not accomplish one half as much as they should, and employees that employers exact twice as much as can be done. Neither party to the contract under the wage system can have a true notion of the working value or the money value of time; thus it is not strange that the one requires more than can be performed, and the other does less than might be reasonably demanded. The same ignorance and carelessness prevails in the use of materials. The employer may provide the best the markets afford, but if the cook has never had brought home to her a realizing sense of the money value of these materials, she is not altogether to blame if she fries doughnuts in butter costing fifty cents a pound, and makes angel food daily when eggs are forty cents a dozen. The employer may also provide the finest of furnishings for the dining-room and china closet, but if the maid-of-all-work does not associate a money value with these furnishings, she uses table napkins for holders, and carelessly drops fine china into an iron sink. From the selfish point of view the chief interest of the employer is to keep the bills down and to get the greatest possible amount of service even at the cost of the greatest expenditure of human strength; among employees, it is to do sufficient work to retain a good place, and to use whatever materials are most convenient.

Mr. Nicholas Payne Gilman has well said, “The deficiency in the daily wage system as a motive power to procure the desirable maximum of effort and performance is extreme.” Precisely the same objections that hold in all other employments to the wage system hold as well in domestic service. In other occupations it has been seen that the almost universal testimony of those who have tried profit sharing is that the system results in economy in the use of materials, care in the handling of machinery and implements of work, and a feeling of partnership, the spur of which as a motive “is only excelled in sharpness by complete proprietorship.” Mr. Gilman sums up the advantages of the system when he says, “Profit sharing advances the prosperity of an establishment by increasing the quantity of the product, by improving the quality, by promoting care of implements and economy of materials, and by diminishing labor difficulties and the cost of superintendence.” In a word, whatever arguments can be advanced in favor of profit sharing in productive industries can be used with equal force in its favor in domestic service.

The application of the principle to the household is simple. It is possible to allow a fixed sum, as $50, $100, or $500 per month for living expenses, which shall include the purchase of all food for the table, fuel, lights, ice, breakages, and the replacement of worn-out kitchen utensils, and to allow a pro rata amount for guests during the month. If by care in the use of food materials, fuel, and kitchen and dining-room furniture, the expenses amount to $45, $90, or $450 per month, the $5, $10, or $50 saved can be divided according to a ratio previously agreed upon between the employer and the one or more employees. The cook is in the position to save the most, and therefore ought to receive the greatest percentage of the amount saved; but it is a part of the work of the waitress to be careful of glass and china, of the laundress not to waste fuel, soap, and starch, and of all, including parlor maid, seamstress, and nursery maid, not to waste gas, fuel, or food at the table, and therefore each employee is entitled to a share in the profits. Thus each keeps watch over the others to prevent undue waste, and the employees are given a personal interest in the establishment now so often lacking. In addition to this, it is possible to allow a gardener and a coachman who have taken special care in the improvement of lawns, gardens, and stables a small percentage on the annual appreciation of property. “Comprehension is wonderfully quickened by the payment of a bonus or two in cash, and there is no more efficient instructor than self-interest.”

Moreover, it is possible to allow a fixed sum for service, as $18 per month, out of which the employee may choose to have a small sum spent in hiring by the day some one to wash windows and clean verandas, or she may choose to economize her time and strength and do this work herself. In either case the financial outcome to the employer is the same, while either arrangement makes the employee a partner in the domestic company and gives her an active interest in its welfare.

It is possible to apply the principle in still other ways. If the general servant likes to cook but dislikes other parts of housework, she may contribute to the Woman’s Exchange and with part of the money received hire with her employer an assistant to come in a certain number of hours each day to care for the rooms, the silver and brass, and wait on the table. It is possible also to give the cook a certain amount of time for making articles to be sold at the Woman’s Exchange, the employer furnishing capital and implements of work and receiving a certain share in the profits. In employment bureaus it would be possible to give a certain percentage of the profits of the bureau to all employees who have kept their names on the books of the bureau and remained at least one year in the place found by them through its agency.

The ways indeed are numberless in which the principle of profit sharing can be applied; and if the ingenuity and fertility of resource possessed by so many employers were once turned in this direction, the good resulting would be incalculable.

Great as would be the gain for domestic service if this principle could be adopted in private families, the advantage would be if possible even greater could it be introduced into hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants, and also the dining-car, parlor-car, and sleeping-car service. In all hotels, restaurants, and public institutions the waste is enormous—perhaps proportionately greater than in private families, largely because as a rule the superintendents of such establishments are also employees on wages. Ignorance is often the chief cause of waste, and the best corrective of this ignorance is the experience gained through profit sharing.

But the greatest advantage of profit sharing in restaurants and hotels, dining-cars and sleeping-cars, is that through it the feeing system could be abolished. In all such business enterprises where the feeing system is established there is in effect a combination of the general public and the employees of the establishments against the proprietors of them. Such is the case because the feeing system prevents the proprietors from receiving a fair amount of patronage unless each employee is feed for performing the service he ought freely to give and for which he will presumably be paid by his employer. The money profit in all these establishments depends largely on the good service rendered by the employees, and thus it would be possible to divide a positive profit as well as a negative saving. The feeing system, if it prevails in any branch of personal service, drags down with it in the social and industrial scale every other branch of the service. The substitution of profit sharing in hotels and restaurants and in the dining-car and sleeping-car service for the system of fees so increasingly prevalent would do more than any other one thing to remove the social stigma from domestic service and make of all such employees self-respecting men and women.

It may be urged against the proposition to introduce profit sharing into domestic service that few employees are of such stability of character as to warrant making the experiment. But the great desideratum is to introduce into the service some principle that will develop the best qualities of those already in it, that will sift out the worthless and compel them to undertake unskilled labor, that will draw from other occupations, where they are less needed, able persons whose natural tastes and abilities would attract them to this. M. Levasseur is quoted as saying that of one hundred firms that begin business, ten per cent succeed, fifty per cent “vegetate,” and forty per cent go into bankruptcy. The statement characterizes with possibly sufficient accuracy the result in the case of the establishment of a corresponding number of households. Could an industrial partnership be formed between employer and employee, with the agreement to divide, not positive profits, but negative savings, something might be done to save the forty per cent who now give up housekeeping and go into the bankruptcy of hotels and boarding houses, and also to lessen the fifty per cent who “vegetate” through the employment in the household of obsolete industrial methods.

It may also be said that profit sharing appeals to a selfish motive and therefore is objectionable. But much of the waste and extravagance in the household comes from ignorance; profit sharing is one way of teaching the value of raw materials. The comfortable theory is often entertained that to be born poor is to be born with a knowledge of all household affairs. As a matter of fact, there is doubtless far more waste and extravagance in the households of the poor than in those of the rich. But extravagance is in reality a relative term; “tenderloin steak for breakfast and rump roast for dinner,” which may be simple fare in the household of the employer, becomes an impossible luxury to the employee in such a family when she goes to a home of her own. Profit sharing would be of value in the household not because it would appeal to a selfish motive, but because it would teach the value of materials used and incidentally do something to prevent this prevalent waste and extravagance.

Neither of these objections to profit sharing holds in the face of all that can be said in its favor. The general arguments for it are many. It is usually assumed that the interests of the employer and those of the employee are antagonistic. The introduction of profit sharing could easily prove that this assumption in domestic service is wrong, as it has already made similar proof in other occupations. If the employers of other forms of labor find themselves relieved of much of the worry and friction that have previously resulted from the mutual relation of employer and employee, it would seem reasonable to expect a like result in the household. If it has been found elsewhere that the extra services called out, and the manner in which they are called out, constitute an invaluable educational discipline, and promote zeal, efficiency, and economy, a similar result might be looked for here. If other employees have learned through it to be careful of their methods of work, punctual in the performance of their duties, and economical in the use of materials; if it has become “a moral educator, and substituted harmony and mutual good-will for distrust and contention in the relations of employer and employee,” then, indeed, may it not be considered, not as a panacea, but as one measure among many that may be of help in lessening some of the serious difficulties that now attend domestic service?

At the present time a public discussion of domestic service meets with little else but jest and ridicule, while in private life the social stigma is cast on all engaged in it, as is the case in no other occupation. To attempt to dignify labor by saying, “we must dignify labor,” savors of the old problem of trying to raise one’s self by the boot-straps. No concrete method by which this is to be done is ever suggested, and until some plan is adopted by which the personal dignity and independence of the employee is recognized, and his industrial and financial independence is secured, domestic service will continue to be under the industrial and social ban. When this improved condition is brought about, there will be established what Professor Jevons considers the best of all trade-unions—that between the employer and employee.

It must be frankly said that the plan of adopting profit sharing in the household is a theoretical one; and to say it is “mere theory” is often considered an unanswerable argument with which to meet every new proposition. But theory lies at the basis of all successful action; difficulties have come in household service often because it has been conducted without theory—in a short-sighted, haphazard, hand-to-mouth fashion. It is known, however, that the experiment has been tried successfully in a private family, and this perhaps saves the proposition from the charge of being only theory. It has been tried by Mrs. X, a university graduate, after one and a half years’ experience in housekeeping. The experiment was made in a college town where the cost of provisions was rather above than below the average. The family comprised four adults, including the Irish maid rather above the average in intelligence and ambition. The plan provided for an allowance of $40 a month for living expenses, including groceries, meats, fish, poultry, butter, milk, cream, ice, candles, kerosene oil, and incidental expenses. The last included breakage and the replacement of worn-out kitchen utensils. The best materials of all kinds were purchased, and practically nothing was ever thrown away. The food was simple but abundant. The co-operation between employer and maid consisted on the part of the employer in planning the menu, especially the making up of left-over materials, the pricing of all articles in the market, and keeping the accounts accurately; the maid gave all orders and carried them out. The profit sharing consisted in dividing equally between employer and maid whatever had been saved at the end of the month out of the $40 allowed for running expenses. The results of four months’ experiment were as follows:

The plan for carrying on the dining association using the Memorial Hall of Harvard University is essentially one of co-operation, and contains some points that could be tried with advantage elsewhere. The steward receives a fixed salary and in addition a small sum each week for every person who boarded that week at the hall; but this “head money” is proportionately diminished as the average weekly price of board exceeds the amount agreed upon.

At Placid Club, a social club established in the Adirondacks, all fees are prohibited, and the rule is strictly enforced; but the past season (1896) a dividend of ten per cent on the wages received was declared out of the profits of the club, and this was given to all house employees who had remained throughout the season and whose services had been satisfactory to the manager. The financial success of the club depended largely on the efficiency, good-will, and ready co-operation of its employees, and the dividend declared was in recognition of this fact.

Beginnings in a small way have been made elsewhere.[326] They are indeed but beginnings, but they seem to indicate one direction in which progress is possible.

CHAPTER XV POSSIBLE REMEDIES—EDUCATION IN HOUSEHOLD AFFAIRS

One of the greatest obstacles in the way of improving domestic service has been the prevailing lack of information in regard to household affairs and of careful, systematic education of housekeepers.

Information and education are often used as synonymous terms, but the two words carry with them entirely different ideas. Information concerning household affairs includes a ready knowledge of the history of all household employments and household service, of the economic basis on which the household rests, and of the economic principles on which it is conducted. Much of this information it is now difficult to obtain. Many houses are found in Southern Germany without windows looking towards the public highway. Light and air are admitted through openings in the rear or on a court, but no chance passer-by is permitted to look within. The household has always been constructed on the same plan. No outsider has been permitted to know the percentage of the family income that goes for service, fuel, gas and water-tax, groceries, meats, fruits, and vegetables. In the great majority of households not only is there no disposition to give others the benefit of such information, but the information itself does not exist. Each new generation of housekeepers practically begins its work where the previous generation began. Its only heritage is recipes for desserts, rules for making furniture polish, methods of dealing with moth and mildew, which are handed down like family property from one generation to another in a way as primitive as that in which books were preserved before writing was known. Advance is not thus made, as is evident from the course followed in other occupations that have shown greatest progress. A vast accumulation of knowledge in regard to law has come through the added experience of individual members of the profession. It is said that every lawyer owes a debt of gratitude to his profession which can be paid only by some personal contribution to the sum total of legal knowledge. The constant progress made by the profession of medicine is due to the untiring investigations carried on by its members, the wide publicity given the results of these investigations, and the fact that every discovery made by one member becomes the common property of all. Until every housekeeper is willing to recognize her obligations to her profession and to share with other members the results of her experience, of her acquired information, and of her personal investigations, no progress in household affairs can be expected.

Much of the information to be gained in regard to household affairs is a direct product of education, but education includes much more. Education gives a certain amount of information that is of direct service, and it gives a training that is of indirect but even greater value. The information more immediately gained comes through the study of art, chemistry, economics, physiology, psychology, and history. The study of art should enable the housekeeper to build and furnish her home with taste; of chemistry, to provide for its sanitary construction and for the proper preparation of all food materials; of economics, to manage her household on business principles; of physiology, to study the physical development of her children; of psychology, to observe their mental growth and base their training upon it; of history, to know the progress made in all these departments of knowledge and avoid repeating as experiments what others have advanced beyond the experimental stage. These are the gains on the side of information. The real work of education in supplying the needs of the household is far more important. There are constantly arising in every household emergencies for which the housekeeper is, and must be, totally unprepared as regards the amount of available information she possesses. There are demands made every hour, every moment, for the exercise of reason, judgment, self-control, alertness, observation, accuracy, ingenuity, inventive genius, fertility of resources. The training received by the housekeeper must be such as to prepare her to meet at any moment any emergency that may arise within her home. In all ordinary circumstances she avails herself of the information gained in school or college and through her general reading, but this is of no avail in the decision of questions which arise outside of the field of this information, and could by no possibility be anticipated by it. If progress is to be made in the household, it must be no longer assumed that an establishment can be well managed by a young woman whose reasoning powers have never been cultivated, who has never been taught self-reliance and self-control, who has no conception of accuracy, who has never acquired the habit of observation, and whose inventive genius and fertility of resource are expended in providing for the pleasures of a day.

No improvement is possible in domestic service until every part of the household comes abreast of the progress made outside of the household; until the profession of housekeeping advances, like the so-called learned professions, through the accumulated wisdom of its individual members; until it ceases to be merely a passive recipient of the progress made elsewhere, and becomes on its own part an active, creative force.

So much has progress up to this time been hindered by this inactivity in the household, and so great is the interdependence of all parts of the household, that it seems necessary to consider somewhat more in detail the causes of this condition.

Inactivity in all household affairs has largely come from three things. It has in the first place been generally believed that a knowledge of all things pertaining to the house and home, unlike anything else, comes by instinct. It is assumed that the housekeeper is born with an intuitive knowledge of the right proportions of all materials to be used in cooking—this knowledge sometimes supplemented by an inherited cook-book and one purchased to aid a benevolent society soliciting funds for a charitable purpose. Her knowledge of the mental, moral, and physical training to be given her children is also to be gained through instinct and experience and the traditions handed down with regard to her own family. Instinct may sometimes be dormant, and experience prove an expensive schoolmaster through the exaction of heavy fees, but no other avenue of information has been open to her. Again, a very large proportion of all moneys spent for legitimate household purposes passes through the hands of housekeepers; yet no thorough investigation on an extensive scale has ever been carried on in regard to the expenditure made within or for the household. Few women when they assume the care of a household know the exact value of the household plant; the amount to be deducted each year for wear and tear; the relative proportions expended annually for rent, fuel, food, clothing, and service; the number of meals served and the approximate cost of each; the amount of profit, waste, or unproductiveness that results from all expenditures made. Every manufacturer, every business man knows the value of his plant, its increasing or diminishing value, the cost of materials used and of service employed. This information constitutes a part of the intellectual capital with which he begins business; he does not acquire it by instinct or tradition, but by careful and exact study of all the factors involved. It is difficult to see how a household can be successfully carried on except through the application of the same principles. If we turn to the construction and decoration of the house, ignorance, masquerading as instinct, quite as often prevails. It is true we have houses in which we live, many of them expensive and artistic, yet as a rule little or no attention is paid in their construction to the specific use each of the several parts is to serve. Libraries are built with little or no regard to the place to be occupied in them by book-shelves, desk, or library table, and no attention is paid to the question of the best methods of providing them with natural and artificial light. Drawing-rooms and parlors are built without a place for a piano, dining-rooms without regard to the position of a sideboard, butlers’ pantries without an entrance to the kitchen, kitchens with absolutely no regard to the conveniences of the work to be carried on there, and bedrooms with no normal place for a bed, bureau, or dressing-table. Something has of late been done in deference to public sentiment towards applying the principles of sanitation to the construction of public and private buildings, yet much still remains to be done, both in the investigation of the principles and in their application. Many of our private homes are pleasing to the eye, yet if we accept that definition of art which considers that it is its highest province to serve best the useful, many of the so-called artistic homes must be otherwise classed. Before improvement can be looked for in any of these directions, the position must be abandoned that the household, or any single part of it, can be managed by instinct.

A second explanation of the prevailing inactivity in regard to household affairs arises from the fact that it is always assumed that these subjects concern only women. The husband of the family often excuses his absolute ignorance of the affairs of his own household by the lame apology, “I leave all these things to my wife and daughters.” It is certainly not the intention in such remarks to belittle the affairs of the household, yet that is the natural and inevitable result. A knowledge of household affairs has never been considered a part of a liberal education as is a knowledge of literature, science, and politics, but when it is so regarded by men as well as by women a great gain will have been made. Moreover, it must be said that the natural tastes of some men would lead them to take up housekeeping as an occupation, as the natural tastes of some women lead them into different kinds of business. Inactivity in the household will cease when the arbitrary pressure is removed that now tacitly compels many women to become housekeepers in violence to their natural tastes, and at the same time prevents any man whose abilities lie in this direction from giving them scope. The time must come when each person will take up the work in life for which he or she is best adapted, be it the care of a house for a man or business for a woman, when it will cease to be a matter of odium for the husband to direct the affairs of the house and for the wife to be the breadwinner. When the fact is everywhere recognized that both men and women have a vital concern in the affairs of the house, the relation between the different parts of the household will become an organic one, and its highest development reached.

A third explanation of this inactivity in the household is the belief that all women have a natural taste for household affairs, which without cultivation grows into positive genius for carrying them on. But a young man with a genius for law or medicine is not only not expected, he is not permitted, to exercise his untrained genius in legal and medical cases. The greater the genius he gives promise of, the more careful, systematic, and prolonged is the training he receives. In a similar way the woman with a natural taste for housekeeping duties is the one who should have most training in them, while in no other way can an interest in such duties be created in women who have not an inborn love of them.

These three common errors—that a knowledge of housekeeping affairs is a matter of inspiration, that men have no active interest in the management of a household, and that all women have a natural love for such affairs which supplies the place of training—are perhaps sufficient explanation of the present lack of all opportunity for the investigation of the household in a professional way.

It has always been assumed, and asserted without fear of contradiction, that the best place to learn everything pertaining to the household is the home. But the same change must come here as has already come in the profession of medicine and in nearly every other department of knowledge. The period is not remote when every housekeeper made, as well as administered, the family tonics, bitters, pills, salves, and liniments, and every household contained a copy of Every Man his Own Practitioner. Happily that day has passed and the era of scientific investigation and practice of medicine has dawned. It was once assumed that an adequate knowledge of law could be obtained by any young man who spent six months in reading law in any lawyer’s office. But the leading members of the bar to-day have been trained in less haphazard ways. It was formerly believed that any person could be fitted for a librarian by doing the routine work of librarian’s assistant in a small country library. Such training has been supplanted by library schools open only to college graduates and offering a two years’ course of study. Less than a hundred years ago boys and girls of sixteen or seventeen years of age began teaching without even a high school education, while the tendency to-day is everywhere to insist not only on advanced academic but also on professional training. The system of apprenticeship is everywhere being supplanted by systematic, technical training given by experts.

There is evidence that this same spirit is slowly invading the household. Cooking schools are springing up that teach all the intricacies of the science “in ten easy lessons,” while the lecturer on cooking with her demonstration lessons has found her way into nearly every town. Sewing is taught in the public schools, and the free kitchen garden is following fast in the train of the free kindergarten. All this is good in its way, but it is superficial work. No permanent advance will be made as long as only those schools are found that teach simply the mechanical parts of housekeeping. New recipes for salads and puddings, new ways of cleaning brass and silver, new methods of caring for hard-wood floors—all these may be helpful in a sense, but the knowledge of these and a thousand other mechanical contrivances will never put the household on a scientific basis and turn its face towards progress.

One thing, and only one thing, will turn the household into the channels where every other occupation has made advancement. This is the establishment of a great professional school, amply equipped for the investigation of all matters pertaining to the household and open only to graduates of the leading colleges and universities of the country. This work cannot and should not be done by the college. The college offers courses in physiology and hygiene, but the college graduate is permitted to practice medicine only after a long and thorough course in a medical school. The college offers courses in constitutional law, but the college student is admitted to the bar only after technical training in the law school. The college offers courses in chemistry and economics, but the college student who expects to have the care of a home should prepare herself for this work by technical study of all that concerns the household. The mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in the home, providing the head of the household herself understands the intricacies of the mechanism over which she has charge, and has the gift of imparting knowledge. These assumptions, however, cannot always be made, nor can it be assumed that even all the mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in any single home any more than that all forms of library work can be learned from a single library. Some of these mechanical parts of housekeeping can be learned in the kitchen-garden, the public school, the cooking school, but progress is never made by treadmill methods, by mechanical repetition, by giving attention only to those things already known. Professional training and investigation must supplement home and collegiate instruction in the case of the housekeeper, as the professional school supplements private and collegiate instruction for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman.

The household has been up to this time a terra incognita. Until but yesterday absolutely nothing had been done in any educational institution towards investigating its past history, its present condition, its future needs. The beginning has scarcely been made, although the field for such investigation is limitless. Comparatively little is known of artistic house-building and furnishing, scarcely more of household sanitation[327] and the chemistry of foods,[328] even less of the economic principles underlying the household; fashion, not art, governs every question of costume, while, with a few notable exceptions, Porter’s Development of the Human Intellect contains the sum and substance of our knowledge of the mental development of children. Years of patient, laborious, unremitting investigation must be given to all household affairs before any appreciable advance can be made by them. The historical and scientific investigation of all the great subjects of art, economics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology in their application to the household, and the publication of the results of these investigations, would not indeed settle to-morrow all the difficulties that arise to-day in regard to household affairs; but such investigation and publication would take the subject out of the domain of sentiment and transfer it to a realm where reason and judgment have the control. Household affairs would in time come to receive the respect now accorded the learned professions. Household service, instead of being taken up as a last resort by those who themselves say “have not education enough to do anything else,” would be dignified into a profession that would attract large numbers who now seek other occupations.

It has already been said that “educational forces do not push from the bottom, they pull from the top.” When a strong educational force exerted from the top shall have pulled the household and all questions connected with it out of the slough of stagnation in which it has been for so long a time, then, and not till then, will training schools for domestic employees be successful. Progress in every other field of human activity has been made only through investigation and the widespread diffusion of the results of such investigation; on similar investigations rests the only hope of making progress in household affairs.

CHAPTER XVI CONCLUSION

Any study of the subject of domestic service must lead to the conclusion that household service and household employments do not occupy an isolated position; that while they may be indifferent to the political, industrial, and social changes constantly occurring, they cannot by virtue of this indifference remain unaffected by them; that the inventions of the past hundred years have revolutionized household employments, and that the present generation must adapt itself to these new conditions; that while a century ago domestic service had no competitors as an occupation for women, it now has hundreds; that the personnel in the domestic service of America has been transformed through industrial, political, and social revolutions; that it has been affected by the democratic tendencies of the age and by the commercial and educational development of the country; that because of these constantly recurring changes in the conditions surrounding domestic service the questions connected with it vary from year to year; that it is governed by the same general economic laws as are all other employments, and that it has developed within itself other economic laws peculiar to it; that the increasing wealth and luxury of the country are introducing new complications into a problem already far from simple; that both employer and employee are heirs of conditions which their ancestors could not control, and that they are surrounded by difficulties which no person single-handed and alone can hope successfully to overcome.

It has been seen that many of these difficulties arise from the failure to recognize domestic service as a part of the great industrial questions of the day. It is not so recognized because economic writers have not as yet discussed the subject, and because those who come in daily contact with it overlook its economic side. The housekeeper who completes her round of morning shopping by a visit to an employment bureau where she engages a new cook regards that and her other business transactions all in the same light; she has both in shopping and in securing a cook been guided solely by her taste, her necessities, and her bank account. The economist must include domestic service in his discussions of the labor question, and the housekeeper must differentiate the various parts of her housekeeping duties before improvement is possible.

It must also be recognized that another difficulty has been the natural conservatism of many women—a conservatism arising from the isolated, home-centred lives many housekeepers lead, and that prevents that intellectual hospitality which is the presager of all true progress. The typical housekeeper, like the Turk, is a born fatalist; because things are as they are, they must always have been so and they must continue so to be. Many persons take pride in being “old-time housekeepers” and look with disfavor on any change. “That plan might succeed in some families, but it would not in mine” is for many others the final settlement of the question. This lack of mental elasticity and the dislike of taking the initiative in any movement must be another obstacle in the way of immediate improvement.

It has also been seen that other causes partially explain the difficulty—the love of ease and pleasure, the attempt to keep up appearances, a pretentious manner of living, the frequent desire of both employers and employees to get everything for nothing, the willingness of mistresses to find maids who will do their work half right and of maids to find mistresses who will treat them half right, the endeavor to get “the largest expenditure of woman for the smallest expenditure of money,” a natural tendency among women toward aristocracy and a dislike of everything savoring of social democracy.

Some of the difficulty arises from conditions to be expected in a country comparatively new and possessing great possibilities of wealth. The growing luxury among the middle classes not only creates a demand for more employees but it also increases the requisitions upon those rendering service. Those who have lately acquired riches make increasing demands upon their employees, and they must become accustomed to their riches before these demands will be modified. Bishop Potter has said, “Luxury has its decent limits, and we in this land are in danger in many directions of overstepping those limits.”[329] Persons with moderate means are the greatest sufferers from this thoughtless transgression of the bounds of luxury. The remedy lies in such education of the wealthy classes, especially where wealth has been suddenly acquired, as will give a more practical knowledge of general and household economics, a realization of the ethical as well as of the economic principle involved in paying high wages for poor service and abnormally high wages for good service, such an education as will result in greater simplicity in manner of living because it will be governed by ethical, economic, and hygienic principles.

It is true that in thousands of households no difficulty in regard to domestic service exists, but this fact does not relieve those in charge of such households from further responsibility in the matter. A political club recently formed to secure better municipal government in Montreal took as its watchword, “Every man is individually responsible for just so much evil as his efforts might prevent.”[330] In a similar way the responsibility of the employer does not end with his own household, but he is responsible for as much evil in the general condition of domestic service as he could have prevented by his investigation and discussion of the subject.

The first result of this investigation, discussion, and action must be the attempt to remove from domestic service the social stigma attached to it. During the feudal period every occupation was inferior socially to that of warfare; physicians were leeches, clergymen were held in disrepute, bankers were usurers, and merchants and traders were tolerated only because they could furnish the ready money necessary for military campaigns—social position belonged only to the profession of arms. The substitution of higher ideals for those of feudalism and the spread of democratic ideas have removed the social ban from every occupation except domestic service. Industrial and social evolution point to its ultimate removal from this employment as has been the case in others.

A second result of investigation and discussion must be the working out of ways and means for taking both work and worker out of the house of the employer. This must result in a simplification of household management and a greater flexibility in household employments. It simplifies the household because it takes out of it a cumbersome, unwieldy machine long since become antiquated. It is possible to arrange a series of mechanical contrivances operated by electricity that will enable a person to open any window or door in his house without rising from his chair, but it is as a rule easier to open a window without such assistance than it is to keep the batteries in running order. A retinue of employees in a household becomes like a complicated mechanism used to attain simple ends. Taking the employee out of the house of the employer brings flexibility into household employments, since it results in greater personal independence and in openings for specialized work. An ambitious and energetic office boy is pushed on by his employer into more responsible positions, but the domestic employee is held back by impassable barriers. Industrial promotion is impossible as the occupation at present exists. “I suppose there must be a screw loose somewhere, or a man of his age would not be my coachman,” said a lawyer recently in reply to a question concerning a new employee. The industrial barriers within the occupation must be removed before domestic service will attract large numbers of capable, efficient persons; this can be at least partially accomplished by taking the employee out of the house and allowing him or her to become a self-reliant, independent, business person.

Another direction in which progress lies is in the effort to put the employment on a business basis. This must be accomplished if any improvement is to come. No man takes his watch to a blacksmith to be repaired, or employs a mason as bookkeeper, or a longshoreman as superintendent of a mill, or a hod-carrier as floor-walker, yet practically the same thing is done when a housekeeper employs an inexperienced young woman as seamstress, installs a girl just from Ireland as cook, takes a tenement-house woman into her home to care for her table linen and bric-à-brac, and then adds to the incongruity of the situation by paying high wages for this unskilled labor. Some agreement must be reached by employers in regard to standards of work and wages before domestic service can be classed as skilled labor.[331]

The suggestion of profit sharing is in line with the effort to put the occupation on a business basis. Only where there is absolute equality, when employer and employee stand on the same business level, can amiability of manner and a spirit of helpfulness on the part of the employee be prevented from being interpreted as springing from a desire to curry favor with the employer. Not until the domestic employee feels he has no reason to court the favor of his employer for the sake of possible perquisites will he be self-respecting, and therefore entitled to respect from others. The practice in many private houses of subsidizing employees by numerous and valuable gifts is as subversive of the best interests of all concerned, as is the giving of fees in large establishments. It fosters subserviency rather than responsibility, and creates dissatisfaction among the employees in families where the custom does not and perhaps cannot prevail. Profit sharing appeals not to selfishness but to intelligence, and has in it elements that tend to make the employee a self-respecting and therefore a better man.

Improvement in all these directions, or in other ways far better, can come only through the investigation of all household affairs by both men and women. Travellers in other countries often lament the sight, still so common in some places, of a woman harnessed to a cart with a dog, or dragging the cart by her own efforts, or weighed down by the heavy burdens placed upon her back. But a more unfortunate condition in such countries than the woman harnessed to a cart is the fact that wherever this is found the highest opportunities for education are not open to women. The woman and the cart will remain in every country where university education is not made possible for her. Until university investigation of domestic affairs is made possible for every one having the proper qualifications, the woman and the cart—the overburdened, ignorant, and hopeless worker—will remain in the household.

If progress is to be made in the same direction that it has been up to this time, it must bring a still further readjustment of the work of both men and women. It must result in attracting every man and woman to the work for which he or she is best fitted. Just as other forms of work once held in low estimation have been elevated by scientific advancement, so the time will come when it will be honorable to do housework of any kind for remuneration. A woman with no talent for art has been known after four lessons in oil painting to offer for sale the products of her work without blushing for her audacity or incompetence. But though ignorant of art, she may have been competent in cooking, and if the way had been open to gain an honorable support by the exercise of this talent, she might have been saved the attempt to secure a living by means from which nothing but failure ought to result. The mistress of a large and costly establishment said recently, “One of the most difficult things about housekeeping is to dispose of old fancy work.” Much of this work represents idle labor in boarding houses, done by women in various walks of life who will not keep house under present conditions, but who would be glad to do so if the conditions could be made more favorable.

It is in many ways difficult to deal with woman as an economic factor, since many elements of uncertainty enter into her life which do not hamper men. A young man is reasonably sure of two things in his future life,—that he will have to support himself and that he will marry. But many young women are not certain of either marriage or the necessity of self-support. If a young woman marries, she is not permitted by the conventions of society to be a breadwinner; on the other hand, she may she may obliged, without preparation for it, to provide support, not only for herself but also for her family. If she marries and boards, she probably finds herself obliged to become a drone, and leads an aimless life. If, without deference to convention, she engages in business, her occupation may be broken up through the removal of her husband’s business to another locality. For economic reasons it is impracticable for the married woman to engage in any industry involving the use of capital that cannot be readily transferred, unless this business is the same as that of her husband, or unless she bears the entire burden of support and has unrestricted control of the business enterprises of the family. A thorough knowledge of some one line of domestic work which would yield compensation would often lessen many of the perplexities surrounding a married woman. Moreover, it seems not unreasonable to consider marriage on its practical side as a business partnership to which the woman as well as the man is to contribute. If she contributes a practical knowledge of housekeeping, the business agreement is a fair one; if she does not contribute this knowledge, but brings a knowledge of other things as valuable, it is also a fair arrangement; but if she brings no knowledge of household affairs, and no equivalent for it, the partnership on its business side is unfair. There should be a definite understanding when a woman marries whether she is to keep house or not, and if so, that she knows how. The time ought to come when, in case she marries and boards, she will be willing and able, and society will allow her, to contribute her share in a business capacity to the life partnership.

Thousands of ambitious and talented women in the upper and middle classes are crying for work, as women in a lower walk cry for bread. It is impossible for society to maintain the former in idleness and at the same time to pay full wages for work to the army of working women. The pay of wage-earning women will never rise above the starvation point while the women of the upper and middle classes are permitted to live without work. The boycotting of dealers in ready-made clothing whose names are not on the “white list” is but a sop thrown to Cerberus,—until the cause of the evil is removed, until women now living in idleness become co-operators in the work of the world, all women who work for remuneration must do their share of the work for half-pay. Women want work for all the reasons that men want it, but as long as so many of them, when they do work, persistently give their work for nothing, just so long will women’s work in general be undervalued.

This readjustment of work and the willingness of larger numbers of women to work for remuneration would be as productive of improvement in all household affairs as division of labor has been elsewhere. A more far-reaching benefit is suggested by Maria Mitchell when she says: “The dressmaker should no more be a universal character than the carpenter. Suppose every man should feel it his duty to do his own mechanical work and all kinds, would society be benefited? would the work be well done? Yet a woman is expected to know how to do all kinds of sewing, all kinds of cooking, all kinds of any woman’s work, and the consequence is that life is passed in learning these only, while the universe of truth beyond remains unentered.”[332]

In seeking for some measure of relief from the present oppressive conditions, it must be said in conclusion that little can be accomplished except through the use of means which already exist, developing these along lines marked out by industrial progress in other fields. In the foregoing suggestions,—that the historical study of the subject points to relief through the removal of the social stigma; that the specialization of household employments in consequence of the removal of as much work as possible and the removal of the domestic employee as well from the home of the employer leads to a simpler and better manner of life for both employer and employee; that the introduction of profit sharing is one means of placing household employments on a business basis; that the establishment in connection with one of our great universities of a school of investigation open only to graduates of the leading reputable colleges is the only opportunity for the scientific advancement of the household and all questions connected with it; and that together with the last, a recognition of the necessity for the readjustment of the work of both men and women must result in making any form of housework for remuneration honorable for any person, man or woman,—in these suggestions nothing either novel or original has been presented. Progress has been made through such means; it seems not unreasonable to believe that further progress will be made through their use.

Yet this view of the subject does not diminish, it rather increases, individual responsibility. Sir James Stephen said, when civil-service reform was first agitated in England, that a moral revolution was necessary in that country before the reform sought could become an accomplished fact. For a reform in domestic service a moral revolution is everywhere needed, bringing with it to every person an appreciation of his responsibility to all connected with the employment, whether employer or employee.

Reforms begin at the top, revolutions at the bottom. It rests with the men and women of the so-called upper classes, whether raised to their position by birth, wealth, intellect, education, or opportunity, to work out in the best way a satisfactory solution of the vexed question of domestic service.

CHAPTER XVII DOMESTIC SERVICE IN EUROPE

It is apparently a common belief in America that there are no difficulties in domestic service in Europe, as it is an equally common belief in Europe that the difficulties in domestic service are greater in America than in any other country.[333] The judgment in one case is as extreme as it is in the other. It is indeed as unsafe to make a generalization in regard to all the phases of domestic service in Europe as it is to make similar generalizations concerning all sections of America—different countries have their own peculiar problems to meet, and these vary in details as do the problems in different sections of America. Yet a careful examination of the question may lead to the conclusion that the differences in the condition of domestic service in Europe and in America are those of degree rather than those of fundamental principles; that the situation in Europe is modified rather than radically altered by the social and political conditions existing there; that as these conditions in Europe and in America become more alike even these external differences will disappear, and that an ideal form of domestic service exists as yet only in the castles of Spain.

Any consideration of domestic service as it is found in Europe to-day must frankly recognize at the outset that the social and political conditions that affect the question result on the one hand from tradition and long-established customs, and on the other from the social and political unrest that was born of the French Revolution. The past and the present, the present and the future, stability and unrest, blind obedience and personal freedom, aristocracy and democracy, have been and are perpetually at war with each other. Every political revolution that has widened the circle of democracy, every industrial movement that has affected large classes of workers, every modification of national ideals of education, every social change that has shifted the relations of classes to each other, every barrier between nations that has been broken down or that has been put up, has changed the problem of domestic service. In England the tendencies towards social aristocracy on the one hand and political democracy on the other, in Germany the trend towards the exaction of military obedience in every walk in life and the counter influences of the social democratic party, in France the deadening hand of bureaucracy and the opposing unrestrained passions of the multitude, in Italy the inherited prejudice against manual labor and the necessity of gaining a livelihood by means of it,—all these forces so diametrically opposed to each other, and so inevitably coming into collision, are but illustrations of conflicting forces that have entered and that must enter into the question. Political, industrial, educational, and social changes have made England a manufacturing nation, have made Germany one denominated by a military spirit and a military régime, have made Italy a land given over to petty industries, and have emphasized in France the tendency to seek official positions, no matter how small the salary involved, rather than embark on individual enterprises involving initiative. Some changes that have come within scarcely more than a hundred years have been peculiar to a single country, most of them have been shared by all, while not a few have affected America as well as Europe. The changes have often been wrought silently, but they have been none the less effective because they have come unnoticed and unrecognized alike by the employer and by the employed in domestic service.

On the other hand, domestic service is affected by many external conditions that are apparent to the most casual observer. These often vary in the different countries, and often explain in turn some of the conditions that differentiate domestic service in one European country from that in another, as well as domestic service in Europe as a whole from that in America. One illustration is found in the varying types of domestic architecture which grow out of the varying national ideals of home and of social life. The typical English dwelling, whether it is detached, semi-detached, or one of a series, is complete in itself and cut off from all communication with its neighbors. The huge French apartment house containing half a dozen or a dozen families, without an elevator and dominated by its concierge, has an artery in a common stairway leading from the loge of the concierge to the upper floor occupied by all of the domestics in the building. The small apartment house or detached house of the German is isolated, but it is in close proximity to a garden café. The lofty, cheerless, mediæval palace in which the Italian finds his abode is typical of the hardness of life for those serving and those served. These fundamental differences in the material construction of buildings must have an influence on the question of domestic service. Houses arranged perpendicularly as in England, or horizontally as in France and Germany, or located in the air as in Italy, carry with them their own peculiarities of service and of work. Countries where ice is not freely used, and apartment houses without places for storage, make inevitable the daily marketing and purchasing all supplies in small quantities; the delicatessen shop and the garden café simplify the question of the evening meal in Germany; the elimination of breakfast from the daily meals everywhere on the continent reduces to a minimum that problem in domestic service. The isolation of life in one country, the simplicity of life in another, the entire absence of hospitality in still another, all affect the question, sometimes rendering it more simple, sometimes more complex than in America.

Yet when everything has been said, the fact remains that in all essentials the state of domestic service is the same in Europe as in America. Employers on both sides of the Atlantic meet with the same serious difficulties in their efforts to secure competent household employees, and these difficulties find their explanation in precisely the same conditions. They have already been enumerated in the case of the American employer,[334] and the list tallies in every particular with the enumeration of those met by the employer in Europe. It is hard to secure the services of women in the household because they prefer work in factories where the hours of work are definitely prescribed and evenings and Sundays are free; because they prefer work in shops where their individual life is less under control than it is in the household of an employer; because they prefer service in hotels and in large pensions since these give opportunity for specialized work, a life of variety and excitement, and larger wages in the form of fees; because they prefer short engagements with large fees at summer resorts to permanent engagements with moderate wages in families; because the growing spirit of democracy rebels against the inferior social position accorded household employees, even to those whose work is rightly classed as skilled labor. Obtaining help is difficult in small villages because employees prefer the excitement of city life; on the other hand, employers in large cities must meet the competition of shops and factories.

In every country, it is true, there are districts where something of the old patriarchal relationship between master and servant still exists, where service in a household descends from parent to child, where democratic ideas have not penetrated, where, be it said, the railway, the telegraph, and the automobile are as yet unknown. In such districts the question of household service is a simple one. But each year, as these classes become more and more affected by new social and industrial conditions, the perplexities in domestic service increase. Moreover, it must be remembered that every period and every country has its legend of an antecedent time and of a mythical Utopia where ideal service for every one has always been found. These legends concerning service in Europe are entitled to no more credence than are similar legends in America—the time and the place where difficulties in domestic service are not and have not been known are as vanishing points of the compass.

There are, however, certain variations of the problem in Europe and these must be considered.

The European employer of domestic labor is at a distinct advantage in comparison with the employer of such labor in America in that little or no baking is done in the individual household, and washing as a rule is done out of the house,[335] or if done in it, is often made a serious matter like the semi-annual housecleaning,[336] while the continental breakfast of coffee and rolls practically reduces the first meal of the day to a negative quantity.

It is indeed an open question whether the simplification of household work thus secured is not more than counterbalanced by the lack of modern conveniences for doing housework, by the absence of any system of uniform heating and the consequent necessity of carrying fuel to every room that is to be warmed, by the absence of elevators and the hard work thereby entailed on employer and employee alike, and by the necessity apparently encumbent on every member of many households of crocheting endless yards of trimming, working on canvas, and storing away for future use countless piles of household linen. But these are at least variations from our own problem, and both employer and employee in Europe have certain advantages in their work even if these are counterbalanced by corresponding disadvantages.

The employer in Europe, especially in Germany, is at an advantage in being able, indeed often compelled by law, to make a contract specifying the term of service for which the employee is engaged. In Germany[337] contracts are usually made in the city by the quarter, in the country by the year. If the contract is made by the quarter, notice of a change on either side must be given six weeks in advance; if made by the year, three months’ notice must be given; where the contract is made for only a month, notice must be given fourteen days in advance; in all cases notice must be given before twelve o’clock at noon.[338] If an employee is dismissed without due notice before the expiration of the contract, the employer must pay wages and board for the remainder of the time.[339] If an employee leaves without giving the legal notice, he can be brought back by the police and be also subject to fine and imprisonment.[340] Again, it is impossible for a person to engage a servant while in the employ of another without the knowledge and consent of the latter, while any one who entices a servant away from his place is subject to fine and imprisonment.[341]

It must be said, however, that there is another side to the contract. If it protects the employer in reducing to a minimum the chances of his being left without a servant, it also makes his life a burden during the long period that intervenes between the notice and the time when it takes effect. The service given by a servant during this time becomes absolutely perfunctory, while the personal relations become so strained as to render the situation almost intolerable. The temptation besets the housekeeper to “rather bear those ills she has than fly to others that she knows not of,” and thus she often encourages poor work by tolerating it, because she is unwilling to give the necessary notice, endure the still poorer service after it has been given, and in the end incur the risk of getting another servant no more efficient than her predecessor.

Yet undoubtedly this extreme form of government supervision in Germany is successful there. The police officials administer many a wholesome rebuke to both parties to the contract. If an employer is in the habit of changing servants often, that fact is known to the police through the service books and the notifications of change that every employer must make. When, therefore, such an one complains to the police that his servant is impertinent or remiss in some way where he wishes legal redress, the officer will probably advise him not to make the attempt. “You had better not say anything about this, every one knows that you cannot keep a servant long.”[342] If an employee makes too frequent complaint of ill usage at the hands of his employer, he will probably be dismissed with a reprimand for his own shortcomings.

One form of government supervision that has been specially commended in other countries is the German service book. This represents the most complete safeguard that has been devised to protect employers from imposition on the one hand and, on the other, to assist employees in securing places. Every person before going into domestic service must obtain from the police one of these books. A blank page is filled out by the police, giving a description of the person about to enter service. When the first engagement is made, the name of the employer and the date of beginning service are entered in the book and it receives the official stamp. When an employee leaves a place, the date with the reason for leaving and a statement in regard to the character and efficiency of the servant must be entered in the book by the employer and the book then returned to the police. No domestic employee can secure a position in Germany without one of these service books—it is a passport that must be viséd by the government officials and previous employers before he can enter or leave a position, and no passport regulations in any country are more stringent than are these service-book requirements in Germany. It would seem, therefore, that this public statement concerning an employee and the official recognition of it by the police authorities ought to be an unimpeachable recommendation. That this is not the case, however, seems to be the all but universal testimony. The service book is of value in weeding out inefficient employees, whose inefficiency, however, would often be self-evident without the aid of a service book. It is not only true that in this, as in every other form of recommendation, the mistress is anxious to say the best thing possible for a maid to help her in securing another place, but the law compels an employer to go still farther and to say nothing that will prevent an employee from finding employment. If an employer suspects the honesty of an employee, he is not free to state that suspicion in the service book; if he has positive proof of his dishonesty, he must enter legal complaint against the employee; if he has no such evidence, he must not even hint at his suspicions. Moreover, the law goes yet one step farther and compels every employer to believe an employee innocent in every respect until he is proved guilty. Not only is he not free to say that he suspects the honesty of an employee, or to leave out the word “honest,” but he must state positively that the employee is honest.[343] This policy is justified on the ground that it is a necessary protection to the weaker class, but it of necessity impairs the absolute reliability of the testimonials given, and it lessens materially the value of the service book as far as it concerns the employer. Even in Germany with the aid of the strong arm of the law it seems as impossible as it is in other countries to devise any system of recommendations that will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that will at the same time satisfy the desire of an employer to secure a place for an employee he can himself no longer tolerate and also the claims of an employee to the right to turn a fresh page and try once more to give satisfaction to a new employer. The recommendations of the previous employers of would-be employees must be discounted in Germany as well as in America.

This government regulation of domestic service in Germany is acquiesced in because government regulation extends to other industries and because obedience is man’s first law throughout the empire. In so far as the conditions can be reached by law this regulation seems to be successful. But there are many factors in the problem that cannot be so reached,—infirmities of temper, the visiting soldier, the preference for an easy place, the desire for city life. Here the German housekeeper must depend on her own resources, and her problem is the same as that in every other country.

Another advantage domestic service in Europe has over service in America lies in the large number of men engaged in the employment.[344] The reasons for this are not indeed perhaps directly apparent. But domestic service as an occupation for men must command a higher respect in Europe than in America for two reasons: first, the competition with those belonging to a foreign, or to a so-called inferior race is reduced to a minimum.[345] Household service is performed in France by Frenchmen, in Italy by Italians, and in Germany by Germans. In England it is given in part by Englishmen, but also to a great extent by foreigners, and the invasion of the occupation by those not English by birth may be one explanation why the occupation is falling into ill repute among native-born Englishmen. That the service is better performed by the foreigner than it is by the Englishman explains why employers seek the services of the former rather than those of the latter,[346] and perhaps incidentally why the native-born servant so readily leaves the field to his rival.

Another explanation why domestic service as an occupation for men commands a higher respect in Europe lies in the relatively higher qualifications that men must have. Not only must a man in domestic service have the same qualifications as would be demanded of him in the same occupation here, but he must be able to speak from one to half a dozen languages in addition to his own.[347] Domestic service is for men an occupation, and they make preparation for it as for any other technical trade. They must spend from one to two years in other countries learning the language[348] in order to increase their market value; the position they can command and the wages they can earn depend, other things being equal, on the amount of capital they have invested in themselves. The social restrictions placed on women prevent their going from one country to another in a similar way, and thus men, for this and other reasons, command everywhere the best places, and they probably occupy a relatively higher social position than do men in the same occupation in America.

From the standpoint of the employer one advantage domestic service in Europe has, is that it apparently costs less than it does in America. The money wages paid domestic employees are nominally much lower than in America, apparently ranging from about three dollars a month for an ordinary housemaid to eight dollars a month for an excellent cook,[349] in addition to board and lodging.[350] But these wages are supplemented in a score of ways. A present in money of from five to eight dollars is often given at Christmas or New Year’s, another is given at Easter, and a third on birthdays,[351] while at all times the temper of the cook must be propitiated with gifts of clothing and the housemaid remembered in a similar way.[352] Not only are members of the family expected to make these additions to the nominal wages given, but guests and transient visitors pay similar tribute.[353] Moreover, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker all increase the monthly stipend of servants by frequent fees given in return for trade secured through them,[354] while no inconsiderable part of the wages received—or taken—comes in the form of profits,[355] perquisites and “gratifications.”[356] Still another factor must be added, the daily allowance for wine or beer, or its money equivalent.[357] In France, according to Weber, men-servants are paid while performing military service,—“it is an act of patriotism and of social solidarity.”[358] In Germany girls in the country sometimes receive part of their wages in the use granted of a small piece of land where they can raise flax. This they spin, weave, and sell, adding thus something to their wages. Compulsory insurance in Germany and in Belgium materially increases the cash wages paid by the employer.[359] It is thus extremely difficult to state with even approximate exactness the amount of wages received by domestics in Europe, since the total amount is affected to such an extent by the variable factors of fees and outside perquisites.[360] It is still more difficult to compute the variations that wages have undergone from a past to the present time.[361]

That the cost of domestic service is in many places in excess of what it should be is indicated by the growing custom among certain classes of employers of demanding as their right a percentage of the fees received,[362] and the protests, as yet unavailing, on the part of the public against the exactions of these fees by either employer or employee.[363] It seems not unreasonable to conclude, in view of all the various ways by which wages are augmented, that they are in reality much greater than their face value indicates, and in many parts of the service greatly in advance of wages in other corresponding occupations.

The question naturally arises whether the value of the service rendered is commensurate with its cost, but it is a question that must remain unanswered in default of any common standard by which service can be gauged.[364] Figaro has answered the question theoretically in the other question put to Count Almaviva, “Measured by the virtues demanded of a servant, does your excellency know many masters worthy of being valets?”[365]

But the wage received sums up as little in Europe as it does in America the subject of domestic service. Even good wages do not altogether compensate for long hours of service,[366] hardness of work[367] and of life,[368] and entire lack of social intercourse.

It is undeniable that the social conditions that surround domestic servants in Europe are harder than in America. They are the survivals of the condition of serfdom, as this was in turn the survival of a preëxisting state of slavery.[369] Literature everywhere testifies to the social chasm that has at all times existed between master and slave, master and servant, mistress and maid, and employer and employee, as it also does to the manifold imperfections of both parties to the domestic contract,[370] while on the stage as well as in the daily press it has been the domestic servant who has always been made the butt of jest and ridicule.[371] “Now, as before and during the Revolution,” says M. Salomon, tersely, “it (the occupation) remains under the ban of society; customs are not changed with laws.”[372] It is true that the domestic servant is often apparently unconscious of the existence of this social ban, and that even when he is conscious of it, he acquiesces in it and accepts it as a part of the social order that he cannot and perhaps would not change, yet this unconsciousness of it does not alter the fact of its existence.

The social disadvantages of domestic service show themselves under the same guise as in America, though often in a much more exaggerated form. In England the existence of a tax on men-servants puts at once a social chasm between the master who pays a tax on luxuries and the servant who is an outward manifestation of that luxury, while the servility of manner that an American finds so exasperating in an English servant is encouraged and even demanded as the birthright inheritance of a well-born Englishman.[373] The servants in their turn enforce among themselves similar social distinctions and the recognition by their fellows of the various grades of social superiority or inferiority[374]—a condition that has its origin partly in a desire to imitate the customs and manners of those above them in the social scale,[375] and partly in the extreme specialization of every form of household work and the resulting inflexibility of all parts of it.[376] It follows that in England “domestic service provides no general bond—perhaps, indeed, rather accentuates class indifferences,” and that, as an occupation, for this and other reasons, “domestic service, though lucrative and in many ways luxurious, is not popular.”[377]

In France, while the relations between employer and employee are much more democratic than in England, the social stigma is put on the household servant, in part because of the traditional character given servants in French literature, in part because the construction of the French apartment house places the rooms of all the servants in the mansard story and thus draws a line of social demarkation between those served and those serving, in part because of the bureaucratic character of society.

In Italy, domestic servants have apparently no social life whatever. This is partially explained by the long hours of work that leave them no opportunity for it; it is in part because women servants never go out in the evening, receive no callers, and are, as it is often explained, “really servants,” in the sense of having no social ambitions; and it is also because manual work in every form is considered degrading, and those who engage in it are under the social ban—a condition that is apparently accepted without outward protest.

Yet much is done to mitigate some of the hard features in the lot of the domestic servant. One of the interesting features in the condition of domestic service in Germany is the large number of benefactions organized for the benefit of domestic employees. There are everywhere homes for aged servants,[378] homes for servants out of work,[379] unions for providing servants with recreation,[380] and schools and homes where they are taught household employments.[381]

Yet when all has been said the fact remains that even in Germany the lot of a household employee is a hard one. “Servants hate a dull place worse than a hard one,” and when a place is both dull and hard it has indeed little to commend it. Women in Europe as in America enter domestic service by the line of least resistance, and this explains why in both countries so many are found in the occupation and why so many of these are incompetent in their work and unhappy in their lives.

In one important respect the condition of domestic service in Europe is immeasurably behind that in America. Even more than here domestic service and domestic servants are the targets at which are aimed the satire and the ridicule of literature and the press, and this is not counterbalanced by earnest study of the subject as is the case with us. The question is everywhere discussed in America, not because the difficulties here are greater than they are elsewhere, but because it is coming to be recognized as a part of the great labor problem of the day. If the future holds for us a solution of the problem, it is because we believe it is worthy of historical study and of scientific investigation, and in giving it this recognition we have put it on a higher plane than the one it as yet occupies in Europe.[382]

FOOTNOTES

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I — SCHEDULE No. I.—EMPLOYERS STATISTICS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE — SCHEDULE No. II.—EMPLOYEES STATISTICS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE — SCHEDULE No. III.—SCHOOLS, Etc. STATISTICS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

The graduates of Vassar College, Classes of ’88 and ’89, desire to collect statistics in regard to the subject of domestic service, and ask your assistance.

The work has grown out of a belief that a knowledge of some of the actual conditions of such service, as viewed from the standpoint of both employer and employee, is essential to an intelligent discussion of this question. It is hoped to tabulate the results obtained, showing the average wages paid in each occupation, the length of time employed, etc. The statistics, to be of value, must represent the experiences of many housekeepers in many localities, and the co-operation of all who are interested in the subject is earnestly solicited. Three schedules are sent you upon which to supply information.

These schedules are sent to all housekeepers and their employees who can be communicated with by the members of the Classes of ’88 and ’89 and the Department of History.

Will you please fill out the following blank and return it to the person sending it to you, or to the address given below? Please complete all the columns relating to each person in your employ.

Only estimates can be given in reply to Questions 7, 10, and 12.

If any question—as No. 17—is not applicable to you, this sign—X—may be used.

A prompt reply will be considered as a special favor.

All personal information will be treated as confidential. The name is asked as a guarantee of good faith, to avoid sending duplicates, and to render possible further correspondence in regard to special points of experience. It may, however, be omitted if desired.

Please return to—Department of History,
Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

December 1, 1889.

1. Name of Employer, ____

2. Post Office, ____ 3. County, ____

4. State, ____ 5. Date, ____

6. Do you live in a city, in a town, or in the country? ____

7. Estimated present population of city or town, ____

8. Leading industries of city or town, ____

9. Are women and girls employed in these industries? ____

10. Estimated total number so employed, ____

11. Are women and girls employed as clerks? ____

12. Estimated total number so employed, ____

13. Length of time you have been housekeeping, ____

14. Total number of domestic servants employed during that time, ____

15. Length of time without servants, ____

16. Length of time you have boarded, ____

17. Length of time you have boarded since marriage, ____

18. Number of persons in your family, ____

19. Name any special privileges granted your servants, such as single rooms, the use of a sitting-room, etc., ____

20. Have you paid, as a rule, higher or lower wages this year than last year, and in what branches of occupation, respectively? ____

21. Nature of the service rendered. Is it “Excellent,” “Good,” “Fair,” or “Poor”? Please specify by kinds of employment, ____

22. Have you found it difficult to obtain good domestic servants? ____

23. What explanation of the difficulty can you give? ____

24. How do you think the difficulty can be lessened or removed? ____

1. Name, ____

2. Place of birth, ____

3. Present residence (city or town, and state), ____

4. Name of present employer, ____

5. Present occupation, ____

6. Years of service in present occupation, ____

7. Years of service with present employer, ____

8. Number of previous employers (domestic occupations), ____

9. Whole number of years engaged in domestic occupations, ____

10. Present wages received, per week, $____; per month, $____

11. Highest wages received from previous employers, per week, $____; per month, $____

12. Lowest wages received from previous employers, per week, $____; per month, $____

13. Have you ever had any regular employment other than housework? ____

14. Name such kinds of employment, ____

15. Highest wages received in other than domestic occupations, per week, $____; per month, $____

16. Lowest wages received in other than domestic occupations, per week, $____; per month, $____

17. Why do you choose housework as your regular employment? ____

18. What reasons can you give why more women do not choose housework as a regular employment? ____

19. Would you give up housework if you could find another occupation that would pay you as well? ____

Note.—All personal information will be treated as confidential.

Please return the Schedule to the person giving it to you, or to—

Department of History,
Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

December 1, 1889.

Schools for Training Domestic Servants

1. City or Town, and State, ____

2. Number of such schools, ____

3. How supported, ____

4. Number that can be accommodated at the present time, ____

5. Present number in attendance, ____

6. Greatest number ever in attendance, ____

7. Total number in attendance since organization, ____

Public Schools where Household Employments are Taught

8. City or Town, and State, ____

9. Number of such schools, ____

10. Kinds of employment taught, ____

11. Is instruction compulsory or optional? ____

12. Is the object of such instruction technical or general? ____

13. Present number receiving such instruction, ____

Private Schools where Household Employments are Taught

14. Names of schools, ____

15. City or Town, and State, ____

16. Present number receiving such instruction, ____

Women’s Exchanges, Etc.

17. Please give, below, instances with which you are acquainted of

and state also how far the results in these cases have been remunerative, ____

Name, ____

Address, ____

Please return the Schedule to the person giving it to you, or to

Department of History,
Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

December 1, 1889.

APPENDIX II

The following table shows the geographical distribution of the replies received to the schedules sent out.

APPENDIX III — STANDARDS OF WORK AND WAGES IN HOUSEHOLD LABOR

The following circular letter was sent out in November, 1895, to the members of the Civic Club of Philadelphia:

Cooks at $3.50 or $4.00 per Week

• Must understand care of range or stove.
• Must understand care of sinks and drains.
• Must understand care of kitchen, cellar, and ice-chest.
• Must understand care of utensils.
• Must understand making bread, biscuit, muffins, and griddle cakes.

• Must understand making soup stock.
• Must understand roasting, boiling, and broiling meats.
• Must understand dressing and cooking poultry.
• Must understand cooking eggs, fish, and oysters.
• Must understand cooking vegetables, fresh or canned.
• Must understand making tea and coffee.
• Must understand making plain desserts.

Waitresses at $3.00 or $3.50 per Week

• Must understand care of dining-room.
• Must understand care of silver, glass, and china.
• Must understand care and attention in waiting on the table.
• Must understand care of parlor and halls.
• Must understand answering the door-bell properly.

Chambermaids at $3.00 or $3.50 per Week

• Must understand care of bedrooms.
• Must understand care of beds and bedding.
• Must understand sweeping and dusting.
• Must understand care of toilet and bath-rooms.
• Must understand care of hard-wood floors.

Child’s Nurse at $3.00 or $3.50 per Week

• Must understand washing, dressing, and feeding of children.
• Must understand general care of the health and well-being of children.

Laundress at $3.50 or $4.00 per Week

• Must understand washing and ironing.
• Must understand general care of bed- and table-linen and clothes.

Seamstress at $3.50 or $4.00 per Week

• Must understand plain sewing.
• Must understand mending and darning.
• Must understand use of sewing machine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FULL TITLES OF WORKS REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT